Don’t you sometimes want more attention? Aching to simply blow people away? The people at Banshee Horn LLC might just have the thing for people who want to be noticed. It is called the Banshee Horn, and it does what the name says. The folks promise in an email to TTAC that the gadget helps you “warn motorists up to 3 blocks away” with a pain-inducing 139 decibel horn.

The howling horn is a project funded through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.com, where the project had attracted 205 backers at the time of this typing, creating an investment of roughly $20,000 (that should barely cover the lawyer’s fees for the patent…) You can still be an investor into Banshee Horns, and rich dividends are being offered: A $69 investment gets you one Banshee Horn, a large cap $575 investment will net you ten horns delivered to you doorsteps.

According to the emailed  message, “the project was targeted towards motorcycles, but we’ve had many people purchase the system for their cars.”

The goods folks at Banshee better avoid getting attention from China. Here, the horn is the favorite instrument of communication with other drivers, bicyclists or pedestrians, and an eardrum-shattering 139 dB horn should cut through the din for a while. According to repeated rumors, the capital of China will soon be renamed to “Honking.” Rigging up a 555 timer, a compressor, and an airhorn will take a Shenzhen tinkerer the better half of half an hour.

Have you heard the old joke about the three Jewish engineers and Henry Ford? This is the version at Snopes.com:

It was a sweltering August day in 1937 when the 3 Cohen brothers entered the posh Dearborn, Michigan, offices of Henry Ford, the car maker.

“Mr. Ford”, announced Norman Cohen, the eldest of the three. “We have a remarkable invention that will revolutionize the automobile industry.”

Ford looked skeptical, but their threat to offer it to the competition kept his interest piqued. “We would like to demonstrate it to you in person”, said Norman.

After a little cajoling, they brought Mr. Ford outside and asked him to enter a black automobile parked in front of the building. Hyman Cohen, the middle brother, opened the door of the car. “Please step inside, Mr. Ford.”

“What!” shouted the tycoon, “Are you crazy? It’s over a hundred degrees in that car!”

“It is”, smiled the youngest brother, Max.; but sit down Mr. Ford, and push the white button.

Intrigued, Ford pushed the button. All of a sudden a whoosh of freezing air started blowing from vents all around the car, and within seconds the automobile was not only comfortable, it was quite cool.

“This is amazing!” exclaimed Ford. “How much do you want for the patent?’

One of the brothers spoke up: “The price is One Million Dollars.” Then he paused.

“And there is something else. The name ‘Cohen Brothers Air Conditioning’ must be stamped right next to the Ford logo on the dash board!”

“Money is no problem,” retorted Ford,” but there is no way I will have a Jewish name next to my logo on my cars!”

They haggled back and forth for a while and finally they settled. Five Million Dollars, and the Cohens’ name would be left off. However, the first names of the Cohen brothers would be forever emblazoned upon the console of every Ford air conditioning system.

And that is why even today, whenever you enter a Ford vehicle, you see those three names clearly printed on the air conditioning control panel……….NORM, HI and MAX

The story isn’t even apocryphal. Except for the part about Ford’s Jew-hatred it’s complete fiction. Willis Carrier invented refrigerant air conditioning and Packard, not Ford, was the first automaker to offer it in a car.

Now, though, did you hear the one about the Jewish engineer that invented the Volkswagen? Actually, that story isn’t a joke, and it’s not fiction, or at least a persuasive case can be made that it’s true.

That case has been made by Dutch engineer, VW Beetle enthusiast and writer Paul Schilperoord in his book, The True Story of The Beetle (Het Ware Verhaal Van De Kever). The book was first published in Dutch in 2009, selling out its first printing and was subsequently translated into Portuguese. Now, RVP Publishers has just released an English edition, The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz: The Jewish Engineer Behind Hitler’s Volkswagen.

Ganz, consigned to historical obscurity in part due to Nazi persecution of Jews, turns out to have been an important and influential figure in German and European automotive development. Schilperoord, more than any other person, has been responsible for restoring Ganz to his deserved role in automotive history, first publishing a series of magazine articles and finally this book. Beyond the book’s central thesis, that Ganz’s concepts and designs for a car he called a “volkswagen” were appropriated by Ferdinand Porsche and Adoph Hitler as the foundation for the design of what became the VW Beetle, Ganz was a respected engineer who was considered an equal by the creme de la creme of European automobile designers. He consulted for Mercedes Benz and BMW on the development of historically significant concept and production cars like M-B’s 170 and BMW’s first in house car design, the AM1. Ganz was regarded as perhaps the expert on swing axle suspensions at the time, and he traveled in circles that included Dr. Porsche and his son Ferry, Tatra chief engineer Hans Ledwinka, and pioneering aerodynamicists Paul Jaray and Edmund Rumpler. There are photographs of Ferry Porsche and Adolph Rosenberger, Dr. Porsche’s business partner and financial backer, test driving a Ganz prototype. Ganz had a long, mutually respectful working relationship with Hans Nibel, the head of Mercedes engineering, and Ganz maintained a lifetime correspondence with Heinrich Nordhoff, who ran Volkswagen from the end of WWII into the 1960s and apparently arranged for Ganz to receive at least some token compensation for his contributions to the Beetle.

On the left is Dr. Porsche's Zundapp 12 prototype. On the right is a CGI image of Ganz's Standard Superior. Ganz consulted with Zundapp before they hired Porsche.

Ganz’s consulting work grew out of his role as editor of Motor Kritik, a German auto enthusiast magazine, what we’d call a “buff book”. A trained engineer, Ganz felt that the German auto industry was making a mistake by only producing large, heavy, expensive cars for wealthy people. In the pages of Motor Kritik, Ganz became a passionate advocate for the development of an inexpensive car that was lightweight, streamlined for aerodynamics, independently suspended at all four wheels, using swing axles in the back, with a rear mounted horizontal engine, all mounted on a platform chassis with a tube backbone. That sounds remarkably like the design brief for the Volkwagen Type I, also known as the Beetle. Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that Ganz actually called his design a “volkswagen” and he referred to a prototype that he built as the Mai Kaefer, or May beetle.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A number of companies expressed interest in building Ganz’s volkswagen. He built prototypes for motorcycle companies looking to expand into automobiles like Adler, and Ardie. Actually Ganz had extensive discussions with motorcycle manufacturer Zundapp about them building a car on his designs but the talks broke down and Zundapp instead hired Porsche. The prototype Zundapp 12 is widely considered to be a precursor to Porsche’s Beetle design, but Zundapp had had full access to Ganz’s designs during their discussions so it’s impossible to say how much of that prototype was original to Dr. Porsche. Ganz was also a consultant on two air-cooled rear engined Mercedes-Benz concepts, the 120h and 130h, that are also considered to have influenced the Beetle.

Finally, in 1933, the Standard Fabrik company started producing and selling the Standard Superior Volkswagen. They displayed the car and its chassis at the 1933 Berlin auto show, and news of that car was significant enough to merit coverage in the Detroit News. Ganz was at the peak of his career, though he didn’t know it as he stood on Standard’s show booth. Another visitor to the auto show that year would soon change Ganz’s life. Newly installed as Germany’s chancellor, Adolph Hitler attended the show with considerable pomp, as the dictator would make building the autobahns and developing a “people’s car” an important part of Nazi policy.

1934 Standard Superior. A few hundred were made. One survives in a private German collection.

Within a year, Ganz would find himself hounded by the Gestapo, removed from his job as Motor Kritik editor due to Nazi pressure on the publishers (who kept him on as a ghost writer) and thrown into prison on blackmail charges trumped up out of his legitimate attempt to get compensated for patents of his that were infringed upon by Tatra, the Czech company then under control of Volksdeutsch (ethnic Germans) said to have ties to the German secret police. Statements on his behalf by Han Nibel helped get him released and Ganz, now certain that there was no future for him in Germany, fled to Switzerland.

While in Switzerland, Ganz again tried to get his volkswagen made and the Rapid company indeed made a short production run of an open two seater based on his designs. Ganz later had trouble with Swiss authorities appropriating his intellectual property (a not uncommon event around the time of World War II – American Bantam got screwed out of the Jeep and the Canadian government stole Bombardier’s tracked vehicle technology) and after the war he emigrated to Australia where he worked for General Motors’ Holden subsidiary.

Only a handful of his coworkers knew of his role in the history of the Volkswagen and Ganz died in obscurity in 1967. He most likely would have stayed obscure had Paul Schilperoord, in 2004, not read a 1980 issue of Automobile Quarterly, which had a short article about Ganz. Intrigued by the story, he began a quest to document Ganz’s life story. That quest involved visiting archives and museums in Germany, tracking down a complete set of the issues of Motor Kritik, establishing contact with Ganz’s surviving relatives and associates, and finally getting access to Ganz’s personal archive in the possession of Ganz’s former attorney. The result is an important contribution to automotive history. The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz is meticulously researched, with hundreds of footnotes citing original documents. Because he was a working journalist in addition to his engineering consulting work, the Ganz archive included hundreds of photographs of Ganz, his cars, and other contemporary German cars and automotive events. The original Dutch edition integrated those photos with the text of the book. RVP Publishers, for the English edition, has instead decided to highlight those photographs, facsimiles of Motor Kritik, and Ganz’s patents, printing them separately on 128 insert pages of special paper, with extensive new captions contributed by the author. Schilperoord writes in an engaging and mostly entertaining style. He’s a fine storyteller and it’s a heck of a story to tell.

Schilperoord’s claims are, ain’t no bout a doubt it, controversial. Dr. Porsche has a large body of acolytes that protect his history. Hans Ledwinka has his defenders as well. It’s a controversial story and when you add in the issue of Nazis and Jews, it only gets more controversial. I’ve known about Paul’s work for a few years now and I sometimes exchange bits of historical information with him so this review is not the first time that I’ve published about the Ganz story. Whenever I bring up the topic of Ganz online there will usually be someone who will pooh pooh Schilperoord’s case for Ganz and argue in favor of Porsche. Others will take up the cause of Hans Ledwinka’s role in VW history. Nothing wrong with debating history. I prefer to assume that those who disagree with Paul do so out of a regard for historical accuracy and not because of less savory motives. Some, though, seem to have an “anyone but the Jew” approach. Almost invariably, when I write about Ganz there will also be those who say that this is a non-story and that there must be some bias on my part because of my own Jewish faith. I suppose that’s possible, though nobody has ever complained when I’ve written about Ab Jenkins and his Mormon Meteors.

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can dig deeper at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks – RJS

“In the end, it was all about the car—designing, engineering, assembling, and selling a product that consumers wanted to own and drive.” So observes Bill Vlasic near the end of Once Upon a Car, his 379-page account of the recent “fall and resurrection” of the Detroit car manufacturers. Vlasic’s book is quite late to the party, following other journalistic accounts by Alex Taylor III and Paul Ingrassia and insider accounts by Steve Rattner and Bob Lutz. Can it possibly offer anything new? Is it worth reading? Yes, and yes. Yet Vlasic’s book also shares a fundamental weakness with the others, one all the more damning because of the above observation.

POV

Taylor’s account is unique in that it explicitly includes the author’s personal experiences, personal relationships, and personal emotions. We learn what it was like to be a leading journalist covering the industry. Vlasic’s, like Ingrassia’s, does none of this. Instead, Vlasic artfully employs quotes gained through over 100 interviews (on top of those he conducted earlier as a reporter for the Detroit News, BusinessWeek, and the New York Times) to make readers feel like they’re the ones in the room, listening in. This is the book’s greatest strength. Despite not covering the decades before 2005, it’s 100 pages longer than Ingrassia, 140 pages longer than Taylor, yet reads more quickly and easily. Vlasic knows how to tell an engaging story.

But can an author completely divorce himself from his account? Vlasic avoids sharply criticizing any executives, and very often portrays them in a flattering light. The more positive portrayals also tend to be the most detailed, suggesting that Vlasic had the most access to their subjects. Of course, people expecting a positive portrayal are more likely to grant extended interviews, so this correlation is perhaps unavoidable. Ford executives Bill Ford, Alan Mulally, Mark Fields, and Jim Farley are especially well-covered. Rick Wagoner and Bob Lutz? They receive less attention than outsider-insiders Steve Girsky and Jerry York (the latter appears to have been an especially helpful informant). We hear that Chrysler’s cars required many improvements, but somehow the postively-portrayed Dieter Zetsche escapes any blame for this.

What Car Executives Really Care About

The UAW and its members are clearly focused on their paychecks. But not senior executives. Vlasic devotes many pages to Ford’s recruitment of Alan Mulally and Jim Farley. In both cases the pitch was highly emotional, ultimately winning over the executives by appealing to their patriotic desire to save an American icon, the Ford Motor Company. Cerberus head Stephen Feinberg was similarly motivated in his purchase of Chrysler. As was Ed Whitacre when fervently recruited by auto industry task force head Steven Rattner to serve as chairman of GM’s board.

The exception: when Cerberus paid “top dollar” to poach Jim Press from Toyota to serve (with no apparent impact, as Nardelli had no use for him) as co-President of Chrysler. Later Press begged to keep his job, not because he cared about the company or because of what he could do for it, but in order to avoid personal bankruptcy. FIAT CEO Sergio Marchionne, who had taken control of Chrysler, fired him anyway. A good morality play: those with non-monetary motivations triumph while the servants of mammon are shown the door.

Once at Ford, Alan Mulally emotionally connected with people, remarking that “I have never seen the depth of feeling for a company as these people have for Ford.” In return, Ford lifers, notoriously hard on outsiders, warmed to him, confided in him, and worked hard for him. At a big dealer meeting, Mulally “made” a group of Ford executives say “We love you” to the audience. This convinced Farley to join Ford, which he saw as like Toyota but “with a visceral, emotional component.” Once there, Farley worked to meet with as many dealers as possible and to forge personal connections with them.

Was it really so simple? Mulally supposedly wasn’t in it for the money, but you’d never know this from the massive size of his paycheck. Apparently non-financial motivations and large financial rewards are far from incompatible.
Beyond executives primary motivations, throughout the book we learn more about what executives were feeling than what they were thinking. Anger, humiliation, worry, enthusiasm, crying, pride, and despair appear frequently. Clearly these executives are very emotional creatures—you’ll find more cerebral beings on a daytime soap. The notable exception: Rick Wagoner, who “never seemed to grasp the raw, emotional element of effective leadership. How could the vast number of people at GM believe in him if he never really acted like he cared about them?” This emphasis on emotions should help the book connect with a broader readership, much of which couldn’t care less about the details of running a car company.

What Car Executives Think of One Another

One of my largest problems with Bob Lutz’s Car Guys vs. Bean Counters is that he hardly touches on his personal relationships within GM, and how they helped or hindered him. Vlasic to the rescue. We learn (a little) about tensions between Lutz and Cowager, who together failed to effectively manage GM’s North American Operations, and then a (quiet?) conflict between Lutz and Wagoner. Lutz disagreed with Wagoner’s heavy reliance on rebates to move the metal, preferring to improve the cars and let the rest take care of itself. From Wagoner’s perspective, Lutz didn’t recognize GM’s unavoidable need for short-term solutions and couldn’t be trusted with responsibility for the bottom line. Lutz hated charts, plans, and meetings. Wagoner thrived on them. Forced to toe the line, Lutz sarcastically referred to Wagoner as “our commander in chief,” someone he obeyed only because of their relative positions in the almighty hierarchy. Over at Ford, executives like Thursfield and Leclair tussled with everyone until they were pushed out. At Chrysler, Press was marginalized by Nardelli then fired by Marchionne.

Trust and Chemistry

Vlasic repeatedly touches upon one topic close to my own heart, as it consumed a decade of my life: the importance of trust and chemistry within organizations. With it, executives get a lot done. Without it, they don’t. We hear a lot about how Bill Ford and Jim Farley bonded over a shared love for the Mustang, and a bit about how Bill Ford and Barrack Obama bonded over a shared interest in green technology. Who knew cliches could be so effective? Upon meeting Bill Ford, Alan Mulally concluded, “I knew I could work with this guy.” Over at Chrysler, upon hearing that Cerberus had hired an outsider to take his place as head of the company, Tom Lasorda stated: “If I like Nardelli, I’ll stay. If I don’t, I’ll walk.” They clicked immediately. In contrast, we hear next to nothing about any clicking inside GM.

Ultimately, everyone was clicking with everyone else at the top of Ford. How did this come about? We learn a little about the steps Mulally took to reduce the initially high level of distrust within Ford. He emotionally connected with many people while actively suppressing infighting and quietly encouraging those who couldn’t adapt to a less political environment to leave the organization. Unfortunately, as much as Vlasic seems to get you into the room he never gets you into a room where people are actually performing real work. We hear about Mulully’s meetings with his senior executive team, at first weekly, later daily, but almost nothing about what went on inside these meetings, just that they had an “electric atmosphere” (those emotions again). Mulally built on effective team. But how? York notes that Mulally “forced” Ford’s executives to act as a team, but how did he manage to do this? Usually teamwork cannot be forced, but must be cultivated with a healthy helping of finesse.

Meetings: Good or Bad?

At GM, Lutz hates meetings and processes. At Ford, Mulally loves meetings and processes, and uses them to save the company. Granted, the gentlemanly meetings at GM were dull, guarded, and overly scripted (thanks to rounds of “pre-meetings”) while those at Ford were open and electrified by a sense of urgency. So it would seem that meetings and processes aren’t the problem, only dull or ineffective ones.

A Fundamental Weakness

While it’s clearly important to create great cars, there’s virtually nothing in the book about what was done to create the new cars upon which the current, still tentative resurrection rests. We hear that the new Ford Focus is great—because Ford product development chief Derrick Kuzak says so—but the story of how this greatness was achieved remains untold. Kuzak receives far less attention than Mulally, Fields, and Farley.

Ditto the Volt, the subject of the quote with which I began this review. After reading all of the recent auto industry books, including Lutz’s own, I still have very little idea of what “Maximum Bob” actually did at GM to improve its products. What were any of these executives like to work for? Like Taylor, Ingrassia, and so on Vlasic interviewed few if any people below the senior executive level, and if he asked any underlings what these senior executives really did and what they were really like to work for he divulges very little of it.

We read about this or that executive’s enthusiasm for “the product.” Giving these executives the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that this stated enthusiasm was more than a mantra, it might be essential but it’s far from sufficient. There have been plenty of car enthusiasts involved in the creation of every failed automobile. What has varied is how well these enthusiasts have been able to get done what they felt should have been done. One enabler that is implied within the book: senior executives who support these enthusiasts and prioritize their goals over others within the organization. But this is just scratching the surface.

The Unexpected Exception

We do hear how some specific product improvements came to be, but it’s an exception that very much proves the rule. Chrysler redesigned or heavily revised the interiors of nearly every one of its products for the 2011 model year—an impressive feat. FIAT will get credit for many of these. But Vlasic recounts how Bob Nardelli, CEO of the company under Cerberus, went through the cars and personally ordered 200 changes. The oddity: Nardelli was an outsider with no experience within the industry. He’s far from a car guy. He was the guy at the very top. Yet he’s the one who made these changes happen. One way to get them done, to be sure, but far from the way it should be done—where were the designers?—and a sign that the organization and process were badly broken. (We also hear a bit about Bob Lutz conducting similar reviews at GM, but entirely without specifics.)

Conclusion

Vlasic’s book is enjoyable to read, as he captures the personalities and the drama that transpired among them. We do often seem to be in the room. But look beyond what is in the book to ponder what isn’t, and you’ll realize that Vlasic rarely puts the reader in the right room. He repeatedly emphasizes that “it’s all about the car,” but as with many of the executives portrayed this is just lip service. If Vlasic walked the talk, we’d be reading about what was done to make better cars, and how well these attempts played out. Instead we read far more about executive suite politics, the recruitment of this or that star player, attempted end runs by outside investors, labor negotiations, and, of course, the government bailout. The book mirrors executives’ failure to focus on the cars even as it criticizes them for this failure. Despite all of the books about the auto industry’s recent brush with bankruptcy, the stories that really matter remain untold.

Never assume that press accounts of what’s going on inside the auto companies resembles what’s actually going on. For my Ph.D. thesis, I inhabited General Motors’s product development organization much like an anthropologist might inhabit a Third World village. What I observed during my year-and-a-half on the inside bore virtually no resemblance to what I read in the automotive press. Journalists aren’t inside the companies, have contact with select high-level insiders, and tend to print the PR-approved accounts these insiders provide. These accounts reflect how senior executives want outsiders to think the organization operates and performs much more than how it actually does. To the extent journalists know the reality—and few do any digging—they rarely print it. So I’ve refrained from even guessing at what’s been going on inside GM. Instead, I’ve been hoping that some insider would write an insightful account of the eventful past 10 to 15 years. None have, until ex-vice chairman Bob Lutz’s new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: the Battle for the Soul of American Business. Lutz has a reputation for speaking his mind and straight shooting. What does his book tell us about what really went on inside GM?

Not much. Lutz’s lips might be moving, but he ain’t talking.

Unlike former “car czar” Steven Rattner’s recent tell-all or the “Corvette book” that enraged GM design executives back in the mid-90s, Lutz avoids naming names. Former CEO Rick Wagoner is rarely mentioned, as if Lutz had little direct interaction with him, and always in respectful terms: “Rick was a kind, intelligent CEO of spectacular human qualities.” Consequently, the adversaries in Lutz’s battle against the “bean counters” are faceless and his accounts of what happened are few and lack illuminating detail. We’re treated to a few brief examples of pre-Lutz products that sold poorly, but no detailed accounts of how better new cars were developed under his watch. Clearly corporate norms of what’s permissible to divulge to outsiders had a much higher priority than providing readers with insight into what really went on. As Edward Niedermeyer noted in his review, Lutz ultimately blames outsiders for GM’s fall, and lets his fellow executives off the hook. His book could have been incredible. Instead, for this review I’ve had to work with scraps.

Dealing with “them”

Ron Zarrella, head of GM North America back in the late 1990s, once remarked that he couldn’t do what he knew needed to be done to improve the company and its products because “they” wouldn’t let him. The response of the person in the room who relayed this to me: “I thought you was ‘they.’” The lesson: even those at the top felt powerless to change things because of some faceless “they,” so what hope could those lower down have?
Lutz takes some cheap shots at Zarrella, who as someone long-departed apparently isn’t protected by the executive code, but acknowledges a key failing shared by many intelligent people inside GM: Zarrella gave up. Lutz vaguely describes his own power as limited, but he didn’t give up. Relying on persuasion more than the direct exercise of power and aided by Wagoner’s unflagging support, he was able to make a few significant changes to GM’s way of doing things.

Too many brains, too little focus on what really matters

Lutz repeatedly argues that GM had over-intellectualized and over-complicated the task of developing a new car. The design process began in a room full of disturbingly casual, hirsute, beanbag-ensconced designers charged with envisioning “big ideas” (they failed to come up with anything useful). Marketing and the ad agencies it employed contributed boards that vividly and distinctively characterized the brands and their intended customers (they failed, too). A product planning group full of big brains applied complex analyses to vast amounts of data to deduce segment-busting new products like the Envoy XUV (which then failed to sell). Engineers required that every car meet a vast number of criteria that had accumulated over the decades. In one especially pernicious instance of the “tyranny of process over results,” the Vehicle Line Executives (VLEs) in charge of programs were awarded bonuses based on how well they achieved a large number of subgoals such as piece cost, build combinations, and time-to-market. Lutz recounts how one (unnamed) VLE demanded a bonus because his “scorecard” was all “green,” even though the product had received bad reviews and didn’t sell well. Struck speechless at the time, Lutz observes that “the obstacle has been, as always, pursuing a subgoal that was easy to game instead of putting the real objective above all.”

Design uber alles!

The real objective? Creating cars that sell. For Lutz, there is a simple way to achieve this overarching goal: make the cars look beautiful and expensive. Everything else is secondary, at best.

At the simplest, most superficial level, Lutz repeatedly had to direct designers to add more chrome trim. (Imagine: a world where GM had to be pushed to add more chrome by an exec brought in from outside.) But, as GM learned way back in 1958, chrome can’t fix everything. Even an executive with the so-rare-it’s-practically-raw good taste of Bob Lutz can’t draw a beautiful car on his own. You must free the designers to do what they do best.

To free the designers Lutz:

–eliminated the beanbag room

–eliminated the brand character nonsense

–greatly reduced the role of product planning (a hotbed of over-intellectualization whose focus on numbers squeezed out spontaneous creativity)

–pushed engineers to re-examine each criterion, and consequently discard many that were outmoded or that, due to an overly narrow focus, hurt more than they helped

–handed product responsibility to the VLE, usually short on good taste, and (un)focused on too many other things, only after the design was done

Eliminate handoffs.

Lutz added a handoff to the VLE after the design was complete. But within design he did the opposite, simplifying the design process by eliminating hand-offs from the advanced studios to the brand character studios to the production studios. The often disastrous consequences of these hand-offs in terms of both time-to-market and the appearance of the car came up often in my own research. Eliminating them should have been a no-brainer (and was among my recommendations), but GM was generally oblivious to how people work (or fail to work) together. In this case, and likely others, Lutz brought some much-needed common sense to GM’s top leadership.

We don’t need no education

Note the double negative. Wide, imprecise gaps between body panels endangered Lutz’s drive to make GM’s cars look more attractive and expensive. But this design problem couldn’t be fixed within his design bailiwick. Instead, the gaps were the result of “a generalized tolerance of sloppy [product] execution.” Lacking sufficient power to dictate a fix, Lutz kept bringing the issue up until the annoyed head of the metal fabrication group finally offered, “show me a car that has the fits you like, and we’ll do the same with ours.” Lutz showed this exec a 2002 Hyundai Sonata. The skilled engineers in metal fab then achieved the requested tight, precise gaps with shockingly little effort and expense. Apparently they’d never realized this was desired. Once educated by Lutz, they did much better. Enlightened and encouraged by this victory without losers, Lutz took his show on the road, educating the scattered tribes on how to recognize sloppiness and the need to eliminate it.

Working within the system

Lutz taught me about the danger of a cheap-looking interior. Indirectly, and through a negative example. Among his cars at Chrysler: the original Neon. I advised my sister to check it out. She summarily rejected the car because to her it looked so cheap inside. By the time he returned to GM, Lutz had also learned this lesson. Here as well he couldn’t dictate a fix. But he recognized (as did many of the people I spoke with for my thesis) that cheap interiors often happened because the interior is the last part of a car to get locked in. (There’s less lead time on interior components than on the body and the mechanical bits.) Consequently, any cost overruns over the course of the program had to be counteracted by downgrading the interior. Lutz couldn’t simply eliminate the bean counters’ cost controls. Instead, he intelligently worked within the system by removing interiors from the VLEs’ responsibilities and giving them a separate budget. This way cost overruns in the body, powertrain, or chassis couldn’t result in cheap interiors.

Half-truths without consequences

Lutz notes, without going into any specifics, that the VLEs and product planners didn’t like having their responsibilities reduced. But otherwise he ascribes no negative consequences to his empowerment of design and his war against “the tyranny of process.”

I observed the ridiculed processes inside GM, and can confirm they weren’t working. GM’s executives and managers devoted far too much time and effort to tactics and minutiae and far too little to strategy and the car as a whole. But the things the processes were supposed to do did need doing, and cannot be effectively done entirely by Lutz’s favored creative types. In his earlier book, Guts, Lutz writes eloquently of the need to combine “left-brained” and “right-brained” approaches. The new book does state that, under Lutz’s leadership, the “planning people” and the “idea people” developed mutual respect, where each recognized the value of the other’s work (while still not liking it). But, with no description of how these two groups actually worked together to create better cars, this comes across as the typical PR-approved “one big functional family” effluent. How well are the two approaches actually being combined?

For the beginnings of an answer we must look beyond the book’s unrevealing pages to the products Lutz oversaw. Many of the engineering criteria were unnecessary. But what about engineers’ legitimate priorities? Making the cars more comfortable, functional, or enjoyable to drive doesn’t really come up in the book. In fact, the opposite is the case: Lutz asserts that if a car looks good, buyers (essentially all of them, he’s anti-segmentation) will willingly sacrifice functionality. Creative, cross-functional, both-brained solutions that might make cars both look better and more functional? They don’t seem to have been explored. More broadly, it’s not clear that design and engineering work much better together now than they did earlier. Lutz might have simply shifted the shoe to the other foot. In his approach, there are a small number of top priorities (usually styling) and other things (like curb weight) are allowed to slide. This might explain why GM’s latest cars are hard to see out of, suffer from poor ergonomics, and hug the road with a few hundred extra pounds. While some buyers are won over by the cars’ styling, others are turned off by these shortcomings.

Lutz ad infinitum, by design

So, as vice-chairman in charge of new product development Lutz was able to get some desirable things done. The cars are more attractive inside and out, and drive more smoothly and quietly. But did he fix the core problem? Are GM’s many intelligent, talented people now more able to get done what they think needs to be done to create a better car? (Meaning without working laboriously up the hierarchy to somehow enlist the involvement of a sufficiently powerful senior executive.) Or, do the great majority of designers, engineers, and marketers remain nearly as frustrated now as they were pre-Lutz?
Unfortunately, on this question the book is silent. The role of personal judgment is clear. Design is important, and good design can only be recognized by someone with good judgment, not some left-brained type following a process. More broadly, judgment must fill in the void left by the eliminated processes. People must rely on their judgment, their “gut,” to make many different decisions with an eye to the superficially simple goal of selling more cars.

How many people possess the necessary judgment? Apparently not the VLEs who desperately need it. And if Lutz felt the need to constrain this high-ranking, carefully selected, thoroughly trained bunch within a new set of rules, then what hope is there for people lower in the organization? Though he spent much of his time educating the judgment of the multitudes, Lutz ultimately recognizes only one sufficiently gifted person—Lutz. How, then, can GM survive without him? Though he’s pushing eighty, apparently it can’t. Lutz retired—not for the first time—on May 1, 2010. But, as of last month, he’s back. Again. Still.

I was just a pre-licensed car nut when the July 1994 issue of Car and Driver passed along the news of Ayrton Senna’s death. Brock Yates’ column in that issue said, “In a sad way, Ayrton Senna’s death dignifies motor racing…He did not die in vain, but rather he made the ultimate sacrifice in seeking his own personally mandated pinnacle of achievement. Tragically, ironically, he may serve his chosen profession more in death than life.” This meant nothing to me at the time. But it means something now.

Fresh from the Audience Award for Best Documentary (World Cinema) at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is director Asif Kapadia’s Senna. Senna differs most notably from most docs in that there are no cutaway interviews–i.e., no talking heads that are a staple of the genre. Footage gathered from 15,000 hours of film, video, and YouTube (much of it from Formula 1′s closely guarded film archive) immerses the viewer in Senna’s late-80s, early-90s life of racing in the prestigious, political and pretentious world of Formula 1 racing.

Much has been made about Senna’s hard racing, but this film presents the softer side of Senna. We see him with his family. We see him charming television reporters. We see him helping underprivileged children. In fact, the portrayal of his relationship with rival Prost makes Senna out to be the guy who just wants to win, while Prost revels in the glitz, politics and good ol’ boys club atmosphere fostered by F1 officials. The Senna we see is quiet, studious, upstanding and spiritual.

The real treat for the audience is the access to Ecclestone’s vast library of film and video from years of Formula 1 activity. The pre-race driver’s meetings, tête-à-têtes with Ron Dennis and Frank Williams and catty interactions with Alain Prost are all there in their intimate glory. The exchanges with FIA president Jean-Marie Balestre expose the politics and egos of the sport. During the pre-race meeting before the 1991 German Grand Prix, Senna and Balestre butt heads over tires lining a chicane. When a desperate Balestre, losing the room, angrily presents the opportunity for a vote, Senna’s side wins. With the proletariat drivers rising up against the Balestre Bourgeoisie, it’s an “enemy’s enemy is my friend” dichotomy–and it’s riveting.

Another gem is Senna and McLaren boss Ron Dennis discussing how to handle the split before Senna races his last race with the team. Dennis says that he wants an amicable and professional split. Senna agrees and offers that he would have done it even without mention. Eagle-eyed hindsight lets the audience know that this is one of their final conversations. The F1 camera crew really pulled a CBS-not-1984-Big Brother act and gave us a moment better than any teary camera confessional. You can see the respect that these two professionals have for each other, knowing an era is over but not that it would be one of their last conversations together.

One the downside, the opportunity to use the F1 footage is the great strength and the great weakness. I want to see Ron Dennis recalling conversations with Senna. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then the voiceover is just the mailbox. We miss so much not hearing from Senna’s sister Viviane, friend and F1 doctor “Professor” Sid Watkins, Dennis, Williams and even Prost. We miss their faces tell us about the man they remember, loved, hated, respected, cheered and/or cheated. It was a conscious choice by director Kapadia to rely solely on the footage, so he deserves credit for trying something new. Whatever; just sayin’.

Any racing fan owes himself the chance to experience Senna’s career through the eyes of the world he lived in. The people that have been paying attention to Senna are not necessarily racing fans, though. I’ve been to the Sundance Festival a couple of times, and if the snooty, Hollywood Prius-driving greenies can love a movie like Senna, then more than a few of the Best and Brightest should, too.

Senna is out in limited release August 12; wider release starting August 19. A screener copy of the film was provided for this review.

„When will it discharge?“ asked a reporter on Monday at Nissan. I ducked under my desk. “In one or two years,” answered Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn. I broke cover when I realized that they were talking about the Leaf powering the house.

Running your house from your car battery suddenly is all the rage in Japan. Why would you do that?  It doesn’t need another tsunami for Japanese to worry about electricity. What’s the hottest Android app in Nippon? “TEPCO usage!” It shows us how much power we consume. Yesterday (green line,) we were at 93 percent, perilously close to overload.

“And it’s not even July yet,” said Paul Nolasco of Toyota, who today met a perspiring me at the Nagoya Shinkansen station. We were on our way to Toyota City, to witness the discharge of a Toyota Prius into a house.

As it turned out, the house is ready, but the car is not. The plug-in hybrid Prius won’t be commercially available before 2012. By that time, Toyota also wants to have figured out how to discharge the juice in the Prius back into the house.

But boy do they have the house! And a few hundred more on the way. Prefabbed by Toyota Housing Corporation, the house comes with networked electrical appliances, solar panels, a 5 kwh household storage battery, and assorted gadgetry. Of course, there is a charging pod with a CHAdeMO compliant plug.

Inside are many screens that allow the owners of the house to monitor electric consumption if watching today’s episode of “Kiri ni sumu akuma” (“Devil in the fog”) should not be gripping enough.

We didn’t need Japanese soap operas for suspense. When the national and international press (the latter represented by Ran Kim of Reuters and this reporter) descended on the smart home made by Toyota, a Mitsubishi i-MiEV was found parked side-by-side with the Prius plug-in hybrid prototype.

The intruder was promptly removed.

Then, the PHV Prius was ready to Meet The Press.

This is the load center of the house. The main breaker says 75A. Very miserly

The 30A breaker in the middle is for the solar system. The 20A breaker is for the EV charger pod. The unconnected 20A breaker? Further expansion.  Note the thin wires for monitoring. The coils around the two hot legs of the 30A breaker allow for amperage measurement.  The EV charger pod has its own communication capabilities.

This is the 5 kwh storage battery of the house, as introduced by Yamaguchi Kazuhiko,  chief of Toyota’s Smart Grid Group..

The batteries next to the house and in the car can be used for when the sun doesn’t shine, or, in a high demand situation, for load leveling. When others in Japan stare at the afternoon peak with trepidation, the house can go off-grid and run from the batteries for a few hours. Should all admonitions to save power remain unheeded and the dreaded rolling blackouts come along, the batteries will keep the lights on.

But what if a disaster strikes again? On Monday, Carlos Ghosn said that the battery of a Leaf would be able to power a Japanese house for two days, the power-oinker of an American house will survive on a Leaf alone “for one day only.”

After he was done addressing reporters, I asked Hiroshi Okajima, Project General Manager of Toyota how long a Japanese house could function, powered by a plug-in hybrid Prius alone. He pulled out pen and envelope, and said after some quick calculation: “With a full tank of gas, 10 days.”

Let’s hope that huge disaster won’t strike before the discharge-ready Prius is available. Smaller disasters should wait at least for the availability of the discharge-ready Leaf.

I can’t say that I was completely surprised when, about two thirds of the way through Bob Lutz’s new book Car Guys vs Bean Counters, I caught a sideswipe at myself and The Truth About Cars, which the retired Vice-Chairman of GM describes as

a Web site that often offers anything but.

After all, TTAC and “Maximum Bob” have long been sparring partners, and were indirectly debating the fate and fortunes of General Motors well before I ever started writing about cars. What was surprising was that this passing shot at TTAC’s credibility would actually help bring us, two presumptive arch-enemies in the world of automotive ideas, to a better understanding of each other. The exchange that a single paragraph prompted taught me that, against all odds, Bob and I share a fundamental character trait: we are at our best when we’ve been goaded into action by a no-holds-barred call-out. In celebration of this shared value, let’s take off the gloves and give Car Guys the unflinching look it deserves.

Like almost everything that has ever issued from the mind of Robert Anthony Lutz, Car Guys vs Bean Counters is defined by his maximum maxim “often wrong, but never in doubt.” As you might expect, this perspective produces writing that possesses many of the same strengths and weaknesses as the cars Lutz oversaw. The prose is direct and authentic, as unmistakably the product of one man’s vision as a Viper or Volt. And like those definitive Lutz-mobiles, Car Guys offers a seductive vision that tickles every erogenous zone in the “car guy” worldview, resulting in a flood of uncritical fawning from the motor press. But, like the Volt and Viper, Car Guys is also a deeply compromised proposition, in which profound insights reside next door to excuses, misdirection and questionable self-congratulation.

Like Guts before it, Car Guys is at its best when Lutz is describing the inner workings of the companies he helped run. His ability to draw a straightforward narrative from the complexity of not only a giant multinational corporation, but its historical and economic context as well is not surprising given his well-known affinity for “cutting through the crap.” Lutz has long admitted to being something of a holdover from another era, a man who has reveled in being contemptuously out-of-step with mainstream American culture since the turmoil of 1960s. This perspective allows him to wade through the complexity of GM’s decades-long fall from grace, a topic that has inspired hundreds of “GM Deathwatch” articles here at TTAC, in fewer than 70 pages. And though the narrative slips by with disarming clarity, fueled by a writing style that is authoritative yet personal, like an after-class conversation over a stiff drink with a favorite professor, one can’t help but feel that Lutz is perhaps too talented at boiling down complexity for his own good.

After a fantastic preface and a brief introduction to his 2001 return to GM, Lutz opens his narrative with paean to The General’s post-war golden age, in which “true car guys” like Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell ran GM with inspired abandon, behaving badly while producing cars that became eternal symbols of America’s finest hour. It’s a natural subject for Lutz, who clearly identifies with this bygone era, and he blows through its good, bad and ugly aspects with insight and pith (if, perhaps, too much sympathy for those who failed to see the gathering stormclouds). But when the thunder starts rolling in the early to mid-1970s, not coincidentally around the same that Lutz began to see himself as a man apart from his times, Lutz’s unshakeable sense of certitude becomes more of a liability than an asset.

Any book with a title that includes the word “versus” can be expected to be well-stocked with villains, and certainly GM’s “bean counters” are the obvious candidate. After the excesses of the Mitchell era, in which design exercised haphazard (if successful) dominance, Lutz argues that GM’s “Empire of finance, accounting, law and order… struck back,” as design became a “link in the chain” rather than the ultimate source of GM’s success. The replacement of Mitchell with Irv Rybicki in 1977 is identified as the turning point in the balance of power between GM’s “car guys” and “bean counters,” and with that sea change, Lutz argues

Waste, arrogance and hubris are never desirable characteristics, but the company rid itself of these at a terrible price. The ebullient, seductive volcano of creation had been transformed into a quiet mountain with a gently smoking hole at the top, spewing forth mediocrity upon mediocrity. This shift to the predictable, so seductive to the bean counters, destroyed the company’s ability to compete and conquer.

It’s a compelling argument, and Lutz supports it well with insights into the accompanying shifts in culture at GM design and product development. But Car Guys‘ cast of villains isn’t limited to GM’s overly-left-brained, clueless-about-the-product finance chiefs. Or, as Lutz puts it, “not all wounds were self-inflicted.” And this is where things start to fall apart.

After devoting six pages of the chapter “The Beginning Of The End,” Lutz goes on to spend the remaining 22 pages blaming forces outside of GM’s control for the firm’s epic, slow-motion collapse. The UAW, which traditionally gets a lot of blame for not just the decline of GM but for the entire downturn of America’s auto industry, is actually let off quite easily, as Lutz argues that GM’s inability to confront the union was

a tragedy with no heroes, but also no villains.

But Lutz is not simply repeating the old maxim that success has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan. His cast of villains in GM’s decades of tragedy is legion: government regulators, Japanese currency manipulators, environmentalists, trial lawyers and above all, the media, are all attacked with vigor, leading to the distinct impression that GM was victim of the short-sighted stupidity of others. This is the ultimate contradiction of Car Guys: though the title sets up an internal conflict within GM, Lutz spends so much space blaming outsiders for GM’s woes that, by a third of the way through, it begins to feel more like apologia than clear-eyed soul-searching. And reinforcing this perception is the fact that the very first words of Car Guys are

This book is dedicated to the hard working men and women, at all levels, hourly and salaried, in the domestic US automobile industry. The problems, mostly, were not your fault!

Of course it must then be asked whether Lutz’s villains actually deserve their apportioned amount of blame, as this question of fact decides whether Lutz is a thoughtful student of GM’s (and Detroit’s) history, or an unrepentant apologist. On the issue of CAFE regulation, Lutz argues convincingly that

A programmed, gradual rise in fuel taxation, along the European model, would have caused consumers to think of the future consequences of today’s purchase and would have provided a natural incentive to move down a notch, opting for six cylinders instead of eight, midsize sedans instead of large.

Lutz goes on to explain in persuasive detail (with help from Jack Hazen) how the CAFE-inspired whiplash led to GM’s disastrous wholesale shift to front-drive and smaller cars. But his logic falls short in the sense that he fails to assign blame for GM’s inability to foresee energy constraints or to engineer competent solutions to it. The argument, in essence, is that foreign competitors hadn’t been lulled into complacency by artificially-low gas prices, and had long invested in fuel-efficient platforms and technologies. And yet no connection is ever made between GM’s “golden age” culture of style-driven excess and the erosion of engineering investments which led to GM’s desultory efforts in the 1970s and 80s. The government’s lack of foresight and and courage, rather than GM’s, is unfairly awarded the brunt of Lutz’s criticism.

Once on this trajectory, Lutz goes on to argue that Japan’s currency manipulation and “airtight protectionist umbrella,” a worn-out hobbyhorse of Detroit apologists with no strong documentation beyond vague Cold War geopolitical theory, combined with the fuel-efficiency experience of the Japanese automakers lent the foreign invaders a “teachers pet” image that was, in the words of Hazen, “eagerly snapped up by the liberal anti-US corporation media.” He only mentions Toyota’s crucial innovations in production and corporate culture only to note that they did not initially spread from NUMMI to the rest of GM with much success, but then goes on to indict Toyota-inspired “Total Quality Excellence” consultants for misleading GM’s leaders into a fog of meaningless numbers.

After defending the UAW (presumably also from the “liberal media,” despite the fact that his “solution” amounts to universal healthcare and little else), Lutz devotes much of the remaining blame to the media. I certainly sympathize with the frustration at a press crops that too often clings to convenient storylines rather than seeking a more complex truth, but what Lutz seems to miss as he rips into the media with gusto, is that his counter-narrative is no more subtle nor intrinsically true than the “import good, Detroit bad” perspective he savages. More importantly, his media-conspiracy boogeyman ignores the elephant in the room: had GM made even a few extremely good products during the 70s, 80s and 90s, its moribund reputation might well have been rehabilitated. At the end of the day, Lutz’s villains seem to be little more than glorified context, the backdrop for the real story: GM’s lack of vision, courage and competence.

Luckily, though Lutz doesn’t do enough to allocate blame where it was due, his return to GM gives him occasion to describe what decades of decline had wrought at the RenCen. Sclerotic bureaucracy, visionless leadership, enslavement to meaningless metrics and the resulting uninspired products are all on hand for Lutz’s 2001 return to GM, as if Japanese perfidy, governmental timidity and media criticism had somehow infected one of the world’s largest corporations with a cancer that had inexorably metastasized to corrupt every level of GM’s organization (except for trucks and SUVs, which magically continued to display an inexplicable immunity to these diseases). Of course these faults operate as implicit assignments of blame, but rather than dwelling on their causes (with the exception of Japanese-inspired “Total Quality Excellence experts”), Lutz uses them as his foil for the remainder of the book.

As he dissects inane corporate initiative after wasted resource in the immediate aftermath of his return to the RenCen, Lutz once again hits his stride. And yet, in an almost strange turn of consistency, his shift from apology for, to criticism of GM occurs without the sense of interpersonal conflict that one would expect in such a transition. In what is likely part insightful truth and part gentlemanly whitewash, Lutz frames his battle as being not with any one “bean counter” but a faceless (and therefore, blameless) culture in which management-by-the-numbers outweighed personal accountability. Lutz identifies individual “true believers” who he recruited in his design and product-led transformation of The General, but essentially absolves the thousands of others, including then-CEO Rick Wagoner, of any responsibility for GM’s continued decline and eventual collapse.

Luckily the portions of the book describing his efforts at turning around GM’s culture are extremely engaging, and will probably be the most insightful of the book to regular TTAC readers. As a commentator on GM’s fortunes over the last three years, I certainly wish I could have been more exposed to these internal battles over design conception, sheet metal techniques, perceptual quality, global vision and consumer-orientation as they were playing out in real time. The extent to which GM had gone down the “bean counter” rabbit hole is eye-popping, and Lutz clearly relished the challenge of working his “creative destruction” upon the staid, uncreative product development process.

The Lutz-led revolution at GM appropriately culminates in the Chevrolet Volt, a concept born wholly of the Lutzian gut and inspired by competitive pique at the Prius’s success and the conviction that Americans would not accept the limitations of pure-electric cars. The Volt’s genesis is both a tribute to the right-brained, inspiration-dependent, individual-driven culture that Lutz champions, but as I pointed out in the NY Times op-ed that Lutz disparages in the book, the single-minded pursuit of an epiphany can create serious compromises. To wit:

General Motors introduced America to the Chevrolet Volt at the 2007 Detroit Auto Show as a low-slung concept car that would someday be the future of motorized transportation. It would go 40 miles on battery power alone, promised G.M., after which it would create its own electricity with a gas engine. Three and a half years — and one government-assisted bankruptcy later — G.M. is bringing a Volt to market that makes good on those two promises. The problem is, well, everything else.

But Lutz remains convinced “Volt is the future,” and attacks “the lunatic left and the vocal right” along with “inveterate GM haters” who doubt the Volt’s promise (I wonder where I fit there). He blames much of the anti-Volt sentiment on the bailout, which, like GM’s initial fall from grace in the 1970s, he blames more on external forces than any fundamental failing on GM’s part. He concludes with optimism for GM’s post-bailout future, but waxes pessimistic about the state of American culture and business. His lessons here are valuable, and build to an inspiring call to substitute pride of product for short-term profit-seeking, a vision I certainly relate to as I seek to guide TTAC around the soulless, PR and SEO-driven “path to success” that so many blogs and websites follow and are well-rewarded for. At the end of the day (or in this case, the book), it’s good to know that intrinsic quality has a noisy advocate in the corporate world.

But with Lutz’s ultimate legacy at GM still undecided (as his goal was to create a sustainable culture of excellence that is not yet undeniable), it’s hard not to take much of his work with a grain of salt. After all, the Solstice/Sky may have defied most perceptions of GM at the time with its rapid, design-forward development, but couldn’t it have benefitted from some measured, left-brain analysis of such trifling metrics as interior ergonomics, and roof operation? Again, Lutz’s choice of title is instructive: in his “pre-complexity” perspective, the way forward was a war between two extremes… a reflection perhaps of what he describes in Guts as “a certain duality of mind.” Hopefully future generations can learn from the struggle that he frames, but with the recognition that his struggle is not eternal. After nearly 100 years spent under the spell of either out-of-control “car guys” or unimaginative “bean counters” one hopes the new GM (and, indeed, the entire business community) understands that sustainable success requires both sides working in harmony towards a common cause.

Car Guys vs Bean Counters is available at Amazon.com, and other fine book retailers.

Has it really been a year since the United States tore itself apart in a frenzy over the possibility that Toyota’s might suddenly accelerate out of control? So intense was the furor over Toyota’s alleged misdeeds, that it seems like the whole scandal occurred only yesterday, yet the brevity of the crisis already gives it the distance of ancient history. Now, just a year after the height of the hysteria, the first major book on the subject has arrived, casting a clear light on the events of the recall. Serving as a history of the scandal, a case study in Toyota’s responses to it, and a cutting critique of the media’s coverage of the recall, Toyota Under Fire is a powerful reminder of the many lessons that emerged from one of the most intense and unexpected automotive industry events in recent years.

One of the inevitable challenges facing anyone writing about the Toyota Recall Scandal is placing a starting point on the narrative. Some have suggested that long-term erosions of quality control led, inexorably, over the years to the cries. Others claim that Toyota’s rapid expansion in the late 1990s and early 2000′s sowed the seeds of its embarrassment. Though elements of these theories seem to have played some role in the events of the recall, the authors of Toyota Under Fire, Jeffery K. Liker, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan, and Timothy Ogden of Sona Partners, begin by charting Toyota’s rise and then launch their narrative in earnest at the outset of the oil crisis and recession of 2008. By combining the recession (which led to the bankruptcy-bailouts of two of Toyota’s key US-based competitors) and the recall scandal, Liker and Ogden are able to paint a compelling portrait of a firm facing two very different problems.

This approach works perfectly for Toyota Under Fire, as Liker and Ogden are students of Toyota’s corporate culture and philosophy, and are able to show how Toyota applied its values to solving two very different problems. In fact, though Toyota Under Fire is the best history of the recall scandal written to date, Liker insists in his preface that

There is a great deal of detail from our investigations and interviews that doesn’t appear in this book, because this book is not intended to be a defense of Toyota or investigative journalism. Instead we’ve tried to provide the materials that are relevant to understanding the crisis and what others can learn from it. The hard times Toyota was living through allowed us to see Toyota in a different context than ever before.

This new context is the crux of the book, and Liker’s background as a decades-long student of Toyota’s corporate philosophy and previous authorship of The Toyota Way, which explores this topic, is germane. As Liker says, he is not an investigative journalist bound to the ideal of pure objectivity, but a long-term student and (admitted) admirer of Toyota’s ideas and practices. This familiarity with, and respect for, Toyota’s values meant that, when the crisis hit,

the press reports were painting a picture of a company that looked nothing like the one I know.

And though he admits that “my first instinct was to write a storm of letters to the editor and opinion columns defending Toyota,” he reveals that a friend and fellow Toyota Way acolyte reminded him that such a defense would not be in accordance with genchi gunbutsu (go and see), a key Toyota value. Instead, he and Ogden applied Toyota values like genchi gunbutsu to a thorough investigation of the recall, a process that produced Toyota Under Fire. And the key finding of their research is that, faced by both a “carpocalyptic” recession and a major recall scandal, Toyota did precisely the same thing, turning to the corporate values that launched it to the pinnacle of industrial achievement, and rigorously applying them to a variety of challenges. Both Toyota’s emergence from the twin crises and the high-quality research and analysis of Toyota Under Fire stand in tribute to these values.

Corporate mission statements may not be the reason most of us read about cars, but any student of the industry (and business leaders in any industry) will find much to learn from Toyota Under Fire’s culture-centric analysis of Toyota’s actions since 2008. For example, Toyota’s decision not to involuntarily separate its US manufacturing staff even when the recession caused massive overcapacity could be read as misguided altruism or a neo-”Jobs Bank” aimed simply at keeping workers happy, but as the authors point out, the issue is actually that Toyota sees employees as investments which become more valuable as they learn and apply Toyota’s values. This might sound like so much feel-good propaganda, but Liker and Ogden bring a wealth of evidence connecting Toyota’s values and practices with the exercises, trainings, “quality circles” and waste-eliminating efforts, and connecting these to tangible results in Toyota’s US plants. Though a large cash pile helped, Liker and Ogden point out again and again that Toyota’s profound commitment to the practical application of values like “embrace challenge,” kaizen (continuous improvement), and “customer first” allows it to emerge from challenge after challenge, stronger than before.

Having endured the recession with relatively minor losses, Toyota was poised to resume its ruthless domination of the auto industry (particularly in the US market), when the recall scandal struck in earnest in the fall of 2009, with the infamous crash of an off-duty police officer near San Diego. Here Liker and Ogden switch to a more investigative mode, focusing on the facts of each incident and recall, as well as the media’s coverage and the government’s response. TTAC readers will be familiar with the extent to which hysteria around sudden acceleration in Toyotas was fueled by ignorance, media hype and government posturing, but readers who did not seek out solid reporting on the subject or who still do not understand the issues will have their eyes opened [see also TTAC's retrospective on the recall]. Without belaboring the point, Liker and Ogden’s thorough survey of the recall’s timeline is critical of NHTSA, but damning of the news media and the trial lawyers who so masterfully manipulated it. And more than merely debunking the witch-hunt hype, Toyota Under Fire goes a step further, exploring some of the intriguing characteristics that make electronics systems and sudden unintended acceleration so vulnerable to such hysteria.

But perhaps the most fascinating chapter in Toyota Under Fire deals with Toyota’s response to the crisis, in which Liker and Ogden’s familiarity with the Toyota culture, not to mention their deep access to company figures and facilities, once again serves them well. In light of the dispassionate dissection of the media-fueled recall scandal, which serves well to put the accusations against Toyota into some much-needed context, it’s not surprising that the chapter opens with a chronological description of Toyota’s responses to the different stages of the scandal, starting with Toyota’s efforts to react to, and contain the situation. Though Toyota’s efforts to mobilize dealers and customer service call centers to deal with the problem, as well as its (somewhat belated) efforts to address widespread misperceptions are good illustrations of the company’s strategy, it isn’t until phase three “turning the crisis into an opportunity” that you really understand the point that Toyota Under Fire is trying to make.

In this section the authors begin drilling down into the root causes for the recall scandal, not simply because it’s the appropriate point in the book’s structure, but because it was at this point that Toyota’s value system forced the firm to do so itself. The authors note

Improvement kaizen and turning the crisis into an opportunity for the company to improve are dependent on correctly identifying the real problems, not just the problems presumed by outside observers. Only then can the underlying root causes of those problems be diagnosed, a necessary step before generating solutions.

The problem as identified by outsiders was, in the words of Ray LaHood, that Toyota had become “safety deaf.” Liker and Ogden explore that possibility, but argue that neither Toyota’s culture and operations nor a survey of defect and recall data show evidence of that popularly-held perception. Rather, Toyota’s internal investigations and ongoing kaizen processes pointed to a number of factors which allowed the scandal to play out. Toyota’s organizational structure, with sales split from manufacturing and overseas operations split from corporate headquarters was identified as an underlying weakness, hurting Toyota’s ability to communicate with government regulators (for example, after-sales engineering was based in Japan, unable to communicate with local regulators). Toyota’s methodical pace was acknowledged as a problem, as it fed media speculation. Another problem, possibly one of the most serious, was Toyota’s weakness in listening to customers. Shinichi Sasaki, Executive VP for global quality explains:

As you know, Toyota has made a lot of efforts to achieve the classical definition of quality control… things like the dependability and durability of the vehicles. But, if there’s a lesson from the recent recalls, it’s that things we engineers do not think are serious could sometimes create a lot of concerns on the part of the customers… We should not just be talking to the customers from a purely engineering viewpoint, but we have to care more about the customer’s feelings.

This, in a nutshell, seems to be the major area where Toyota contributed to its misfortune in the recall crisis. Not only does SUA bend the traditional “defect” paradigm, but in my opinion Toyota’s core value of not blaming customers may have denied it an important tool in explaining the distinction between a true “defect” and an opportunity to misuse or become frightened by an automobile (like installing the wrong mats, or misunderstanding the function of a “smart” cruise control system). From a pure PR perspective, one could argue that Toyota allowed its reputation to be turned on its head (at least temporarily) in order to avoid the perception that it was blaming anyone other than itself, an approach that actually fueled suspicion of it.

But, as Toyota Under Fire proves, culture is the lifeblood of Toyota, and blaming customers would have gone against a number of the firm’s cultural values, including “customer first” and “ownership and responsibility.” Though adhering to that culture put Toyota at a tactical disadvantage once in the midst of the scandal, the fact that Toyota refused to abandon its principles in a moment of desperation will ultimately maintain the firm’s strategic advantage. Had Toyota truly become “safety deaf” or actually allowed dangerous defects to be sold, it might have had some cause to rethink the culture that has launched it to the top of the auto industry. Because the recall scandal was actually caused by a number of subtle, even mundane challenges that arose from Toyota’s development, the Toyota Way (which is, at its base, a system of identifying and eliminating problems) was the perfect foundation on which to once again rebuild the company.

Toyota Under Fire ends with a number of lessons, aimed largely at leaders of organizations wishing to learn from Toyota’s experience. The authors offer lessons about cross-cultural communication, the media, confronting weaknesses, taking responsibility and more, but perhaps the most important lesson is the simplest one: commitment to a healthy culture will always trump radical change once a crisis arrives. In an industry dominated by products, personality, style and cyclical changes, it’s easy to forget that one of Toyota’s greatest contributions to modern industry is in its corporate culture.

In fact, since Toyota’s struggles last year, several industry commentators have goner as far as to wonder how Toyota ever became as dominant as it did, given that its brand and products don’t have any “special appeal” in terms of power, styling or image. What Toyota Under Fire explains so wonderfully is just how deeply engrained Toyota’s culture is in everything it does, how that culture discretely goes about the business of constant improvement, and how it delivers meaningful results even when facing huge challenges. And as Toyota has proved by becoming one of the world’s dominant automakers and then surviving two huge challenges in its largest market, the cultural “intangibles” can be the difference between success and failure.

Toyota Under Fire is available from Amazon and other fine book retailers. Contact the authors, access their research materials and order the book directly at www.toyotaunderfire.com

The Truth About Cars, Edward Niedermeyer and Bertel Schmitt are all cited as sources in this book.

The ad says that cotton is “the fabric of our lives.” It wasn’t the fabric of my youth, I can tell you that. There were the blue school uniforms, seemingly forged in a single piece from iron-strong polyester, hot in the summer and abrasive in the winter. There were suits and ties in rough wool to wear during the weekends, sweaters in soft Lacoste velour and miserable Brooks cable knit, and the instantly dirty, plasticized leather of the Nike “Burt Bruin” shoes on my feet. And, of course, there was M-B Tex, eternal and unchanging, perennially youthful even as the car surrounding it disintegrated into flakes of chromed rust.

You have to understand this: there was only really one acceptable Mercedes-Benz to own, and that was the W123-chassis 240D. The S-Class was for bounders, social climbers, and the irresponsible. I can still remember gagging with personal agitation as my father refused to even test-drive a W126 560SEL. “Not the message I’d want to send.” Instead, he bought an XJ6, which at least sent the message that its owner, stranded by the side of the road, waiting for the next tow truck, had a certain dash and/or panache. No, the one to have was the diesel taxi, in beige or red, perhaps with yellow foglights. It was staid, reliable, respectable, a twenty-year car. We understood, as children, that certain mommies and daddies had so much money that they simply could not contain it, that it burst from the seams of their Yves Saint Laurent flannel three-pieces, that this money resulted in acquisition of the slightly embarrassing but still acceptable 300D, with its rather brash “TURBODIESEL” script on the decklid. Still the 300D did not commit the sin of leather.

M-B Tex is the interior material of the gods. It does not wear, stain, or fatigue. It instantly adjusts to exterior temperature and/or sun load, freezing skin solid to its bolsters in winter and smoking the leg hair off the lazy women on the way to an August day at the pool. It comes in several colors, none of which are quite the color of any known leather dye. It was found in the 240D, the 300D, and even the daddy-knows-someone-who-knows-someone-who-takes-risks 230 and 280E. Every ride caught to school, to soccer practice, to the pool or playground was in one of these Tex-lined conveyances, crawling through the towns of Long Reach, Upper Arlington, Reisterstown, White Plans, and all the other little burgs where the train of my childhood came to a temporary halt.

M-B Tex is still around, but that’s like saying that Guns N’ Roses are still around. When you throw everything away that made your band, or your brand, great, it doesn’t matter if you’re slinging the same vinyl or have the same singer on the vinyl. I wouldn’t be surprised if the new M-B Tex suffered from the same lousy quality and ephemeral construction which is as much a part of the three-pointed-star’s image now as eternal, vegetable-oil-burning four-cylinder diesels used to be. I don’t like to think about it. I wouldn’t want a new Mercedes. The last one I owned, as opposed to leased, was a 190E 2.3-16. I suppose I’d consider a CL, but nowadays I tend to spend my car money on musical instruments.

No wonder, then, that when I heard about a company which made guitar straps and wallets from old “deadstock” M-B Tex, I immediately visited their website and dropped a couple hundred bucks on the stuff. The package arrived yesterday, and I could hardly wait to take some lousy pictures with my lousy camera so all of you could see this stuff. Couch Guitar Straps are made in the United States under “sweatshop-free” conditions, so I decided to pair the straps with another great American-made brand. The Heritage Guitar Company, located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, builds a very small number of guitars using the original Gibson tooling, in the original Gibson factory. Many of the employees are former Gibson people who were left behind when that firm moved to union-free Nashville thirty years ago. One of the founders, a fellow named Marv Lamb, started working at Gibson in 1957 and has been making guitars ever since. Some Heritage owners say that their guitars are “the real Gibsons”. I don’t know if that’s right. I do consider them the proper successors to those fabulous Les Pauls, Flying Vs, ES-335s, and L-5s made way back when.

I’ve uploaded these photos in 2400px size, so if you want to see the details, click away. The brown M-B Tex seen in the above photo is the basis for Couch’s most expensive strap. I’ve placed it here with two of my Heritage H-555 semi-hollowbodies. The strap has “cruelty-free” vinyl ends and Samsonite-style stitching; the guitars have inlays constructed of abalone and mother-of-pearl, ebony fretboards, gold-plated hardware, and Seymour Duncan pickups.

Also available is the infamous red M-B Tex. For some reason, MBUSA loved to saddle its dealers with beige 240Ds avec red Tex interiors. Here’s a 190E with that interior:

Quite a feast for the eyes. The wallet at the top of this article is made from the same material. Here’s the strap, pictured with my H-170 double cutaway. Marv Lamb himself “rolled” the neck on this one. The back is a single gorgeous piece of mahogany. plain-sawn near the center of a very big old tree.

Couch has a variety of different materials. Here’s another motif from my pre-teen years: the “8-bit” strap, shown on my H-535 “23rd Anniversary”. Seymour Duncan “Seth Lover” pickups and nickel hardware create a sound and feel very similar to an early Gibson ES-335.

They also have a variety of fabric straps, which can be made from more “deadstock” — in this case, fabric trunk lining originally destined for Pontiac and Ford automobiles. It’s worth checking out. Unfortunately, there’s no special TTAC deal, primarily because the company has no idea I’m reviewing the product. Maybe you can talk them into something.

I suspect these straps will last a long time. They aren’t cheap, so they had better last a long time. I’ll pass them down to my son, along with the guitars, his 911, and the other miscellany, but I suspect he won’t really be that interested. Perhaps he’ll want a sling for his sampler made from Chevrolet Volt interior fabric. More likely, I’ll have to tell him what a Chevrolet Volt was. Perhaps one of those old Benz diesels will wander by on the road while I’m explaining the difference between craft and junk.

Test Drive Unlimited 2 (TDU2) is the latest pistonhead-oriented video game, a genre I’ve enjoyed since Test Drive first arrived in 1987. My PS3 usually spins two amazing time wasters: Gran Turismo 5 (GT5) for sheer hotshoe geekiness and the Grand Theft Auto series (GTA) for snark, storyline and reality-blurring gameplay. TDU2 sets out to blend elements of both, making it unique and intriguing in concept alone. But does the promise of a game that’s less serious than GT5 but more car-focused than GTA work in practice?

True to the GTA-side of the equation, TDU2 is escapism incarnate: you start in Ibiza (Hawaii comes later), the island famous for catering to the wealthy party-going set. That implies the need for top dollar super cars, flashy SUVs, and old school classics. The need for low-rent valets is obvious. That’s who “you” are: a hotel car-jockey daydreaming of a Jack Baruth racing lifestyle.

It’s a fun premise: TDU2 starts with poolside trust fund babies in a Penthouse apartment. You decide which person (avatar) best represents you: White/Black/Asian guy or girl. This sucks if you are a brown person but eventually I found a plastic surgery center, spent thousands of dollars and made “him” look more like me. Yes, really.

Back to the Penthouse: we learn that said party is in your honor. And there’s a gift in the garage: a Ferrari California! A woman wearing a dress tighter than Chrysler’s operating profit wants you to drive it. There are Barbie-doll females aplenty, but this is a “T for Teen” rated game: car-related dialogue matches the labored smack talk of a Fast And Furious flick. Ordinary conversations are whitewashed to the point of vapid PR jabber. Worse still, the majority of characters are complete douchebags, even the nice folks are fake and robotic compared to GTA.

Then again, there’s no Holy Grail of car-gaming communications: unlike GT5, TDU2 never insists on a catalytic converter upgrade on a pre-emissions vehicle. Good for them.

Back to the game, your birthday party is just a dream. And “you” wake up as a lowly valet, working up the ranks of a racing series called Solar Crown. The premise is kid friendly: TDU2 gets youngsters interested in cars by adding the social gaming elements of Xbox/PS3 consoles into the pistonhead mix. Kids won’t forget their smart phone aspirations, but TDU2 could make them lust for a Pagani Zonda.

Let’s dig into the social world: unlike GT5, one gets out of their car to do stuff. And you will explore: TDU2 demands purchasing more houses, more cars, attending (terribly pointless) driving schools and interacting with fellow racers on a variety of fronts.

My “favs” include car spots sprinkled around Ibiza: brand specific dealerships, performance garages, and automotive window dressings available via body shops. The free-roam gameplay is entertaining, kept organized by a map so beautifully detailed it makes Google Earth blush and GTA weep in agony. Much like said map, TDU2’s graphics are excellent, but the cars aren’t rendered to the point of GT5’s car-porn realism.

Too bad TDU2’s driving simulator is not for those old enough for a driver’s license. Vehicle dynamics contain enough vague responses to put away the race seat/feedback tiller in favor of a normal controller. And you must drive everywhere, at least once: unlike the geographically-diverse environment of GTA San Andreas, this gets old quickly. Making things worse, the music and DJ chatter is derivative, dull and repetitive. Earning TDU2’s style points for fast driving is also difficult, adding frustration for those with inflamed ADHD. City-to-city travel should let you have your cake and eat it too: this game takes too long to get to the goods, it’s an exercise in patience.

But, like the others, TDU2 lets one drive like a maniac without the pitfalls of vehicle collisions and their associated legal fees. Speaking of, there’s little damage upon impact and the island is deserted, aside from vehicular traffic. But the in-car views of the island are thrilling: watching the Lotus Espirt’s needles move to the right at full throttle was a great thrill compared to the UR-Accolade version of this game.

Back to why this is a non-driving simulator: while not a raging fan of online play, meeting fellow racers in the (awesomely rendered) clubhouse was wicked-cool. There were challenges aplenty created by fellow gamers, available at an activity desk. Back on the road, if you spot someone worth challenging, flash your lights, wait for confirmation, and get ready to rumble.

I’ve barely scratched the surface in this review, mostly because it feels like explaining the concept of an all-inclusive resort to someone that’s never seen an airport. This YouTube review will narrow the gap. If you like online interaction and wish to endlessly modify parameters such as the design of your homes/cars/avatar, this game can go on forever. Even with the driving simulator flaws and utterly trite dialogue, TDU2 is worth owning. If you have kids.

Atari provided a copy of Test Drive Unlimited 2 for this review.

Sports Car Racing In Camera, 1950-59 by Paul Parker

John McElroy recently quit the Automotive Press Association because they invited Steven Rattner, former head of the government’s auto industry task force, to speak. He warned, “If you want to read [his] book, DON’T BUY IT. Get it from your local library, because Steven Rattner is a rat who doesn’t deserve a dime of anyone’s money.” What he didn’t say: don’t read the book. And with good reason: it’s well-written, insightful, and definitely worth reading.

McElroy has repeatedly attacked Rattner’s character, even ripping on his last name, Fast Times at Ridgemont High style. He notes that Rattner was an investor in Cerberus before serving on the task force, likely used his influence to keep the media from covering his wife’s DUI, and was involved in a kickback scheme with the New York pension fund. I don’t doubt that this is all true, but still see insufficient grounds for such a vehement reaction.

Rattner’s book clearly involved a lot of hard work. He did not simply write up his own recollections. Instead, he claims to have interviewed many of the people involved, and impressive levels of detail and accuracy confirm this. The average book by a seasoned automotive journalist is shoddy in comparison.

If anyone should see a thoroughly researched book as work that deserves to be compensated, it is a journalist. Essentially, McElroy is arguing that anyone accused of a crime (Rattner hasn’t actually been convicted of a crime, though he has now paid very large settlements) does not deserve to be compensated for any of their work, even hard work unrelated to the crime. (A book based on the kickback scheme would be a different matter.)

This isn’t a tenable position. Something else is going on. McElroy provides some hints, labeling the book a “kiss and tell.” He’d clearly prefer that Rattner had, like most insiders, kept his mouth shut. The problem isn’t the accuracy of what Rattner wrote. This isn’t questioned. The problem is that Rattner divulges the contents of private meetings and private discussions. These meetings and discussions were conducted in the public interest, and involved tens of billions of public dollars, but apparently the public has no right to know what went on in them. McElroy interviews people for a living, and touts his show as “uncensored.” He must want at least some people to talk. Why not Rattner?

Rattner’s character isn’t a sufficient reason. Everyone in the auto industry isn’t squeaky clean, but dirty laundry tends to be ignored. Rattner is a special case.

What makes Rattner special? I don’t know, but can hypothesize.

Rattner was and remains an outsider who by his own admission knew nothing about the auto industry. The latter proves a non-issue. I’m generally skeptical of the entire concept of “quick studies,” but Rattner almost makes me a believer. The book includes accurate insights about how GM and Chrysler operate that have seemingly eluded the bulk of the auto industry press for decades. For example, “nothing happens at GM without PowerPoint,” labor was being treated as a fixed cost with absurd consequences, and the “grin fucking” “culture of mediocrity” couldn’t handle open conflicts, preferring to let things drag out forever behind the scenes. In comparison, the UAW’s leadership seemed knowledgeable and realistic once out of view of the membership. They had a better grasp of GM’s situation than GM’s leaders did, and behind the scenes were interested in working out a viable solution.

Unlike a journalist who must maintain access to sources, Rattner clearly felt free to communicate what he and other insiders observed. Such as the Treasury Secretary Paulson’s initial reaction to GM’s initial request for help: “This is complete bullshit!” And Rahm Emanuel’s reaction to the supposed need to save union jobs: “Fuck the UAW.” (Was the latter said and then written for the sake of appearances? Perhaps.) In true “kiss and tell” fashion, names are named, and Rattner colorfully expresses his personal opinions of various players. A violation of insider etiquette? No doubt. But we learn much more as a result.

Perhaps the largest revelation: GM possessed a very weak grasp of its finances and cash position, and was repeatedly unable to answer basic financial questions. GM’s leaders “seemed to be living in a fantasy world” and refused to consider bankruptcy, even though a bankruptcy seemed virtually certain to the task force. (The goal of the task force nearly from the start was not to avoid bankruptcy, but to avoid an uncontrolled bankruptcy.) For these reasons, Rattner repeatedly characterizes GM’s top executives, and especially CFO Ray Young “whose lack of common sense seemed limitless,” as incompetent. And yet he also gives GM’s leaders credit where it is due, noting that GM’s manufacturing operations were much more efficient than the task force initially assumed, and that there was thus no fundamental reason it couldn’t compete.

Worse than being an ignorant outsider, Rattner was from Wall Street, the worst sort of outsider. His New York personality tends to rub Midwesterners the wrong way. They—and I do mean they, McElroy is far from alone in his opinion—don’t like him.

Adding insult to injury, this unlikable outsider decided he could overhaul the auto industry without relying heavily on insiders. Rattner acknowledges that the team received “much unsolicited advice,” but found many of the suggestions “impractical.” In general insiders were seen as too wedded to how things had been done and so incapable of envisioning much less producing the necessary changes. Some insiders with advice (or more) to offer might have felt slighted.

Some have argued that Rattner’s book is overly self-serving. They must have read a different book than I did—if they read it at all. Rattner rarely takes personal credit for the accomplishments of the task force, instead ascribing nearly all of them to other members, especially labor expert Ron Bloom, corporate restructuring expert (and Republican) Harry Wilson, and bankruptcy expert Matt Feldman. Bloom took the lead on Chrysler, while Wilson did the same with GM.

Rattner describes some conflicts within the task force. Some members, most prominently Wilson, wanted to kill Chrysler, partly because the case for saving it was weak, partly to give GM a better shot at success. The decision to instead save Chrysler was ultimately made by Obama, and by the slimmest of margins. Rattner doesn’t conceal his distaste for Sergio Marchionne, who apparently tried to use the unbeatable hand the government dealt him to bully the other parties into submission. After Chrysler was taken care of, Bloom tried to assume an equally prominent role in the GM overhaul, which brought him into conflict with Wilson.

We’ve heard a lot about how badly bondholders were treated, but Rattner convincingly argues that they’ve actually received more than they should have. If the companies had liquidated, debt holders would have received very little, perhaps even nothing in the case of GM’s bondholders. Only the government’s desire to save the companies from liquidation gave them any reason to expect more. They knew that every day the situation remained unresolved would cost the government tens of millions of dollars. So by threatening to delay a resolution they hoped to force the government to pay them off. The task force called their bluff and managed a quick resolution through the bankruptcy courts, where the judges prioritized keeping the companies alive. As part of the process the debt holders ended up receiving considerably more than Rattner strongly felt they deserved. They received their payoff, just not as large a payoff as they dreamed of receiving.

Rattner does take personal credit (blame?) for one thing he felt needed to be change, but that insiders were not going to change. New investors in troubled companies often replace the top executives, and the government was serving as GM’s investor of last resort. So, acting much like a private equity investor, Rattner personally fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner, and stepped up to take the resulting flack. Many prominent members of the automotive press liked Wagoner. And, even if they hadn’t, they don’t like the idea of outsiders firing insiders. Prominent members of the press likely think of themselves as insiders, and closely identify with the executives they cover. Powerful outsiders like Rattner are the common enemy.

Rattner doesn’t pretend that the outcome was perfect. Though Obama is generally portrayed in a good light, the president is criticized for one thing: refusing to jointly work with the Bush administration on the crisis. In Rattner’s view, the “one president at a time” mantra cost taxpayers billions by delaying the bankruptcies. Another indication that the book is not political, Rattner praises Republican senator Corker for attempting to use the crisis to force needed changes, and credits him for laying down guidelines that shaped the outcome.

Rattner also wishes more could have been done to wring concessions from the UAW, especially with regard to the pension plan, and to change the culture at GM. He criticizes the UAW for selling out new hires in order to protect the wages of existing workers. And, at the end of the book, the question of who can and should lead GM remains undecided, with Henderson and Whitacre (the latter the task force’s last chance to effect meaningful cultural change within GM) both out after short terms.

But, by his own admission, Rattner’s a pragmatist. He realizes that the outcome is never going to be perfect, and that insisting on a perfect outcome likely would have resulted in a much worse outcome for all involved. The major achievement of the task force was forcing everyone to accept a less than ideal outcome from their own perspective, to share the pain—which had not been done with the financial industry bail out. Given huge problems decades in the making and just a few months to solve them, the task force achieved much more than anyone could have expected it to without the benefit of hindsight. It’s easy to forget how impossible a GM bankruptcy seemed to most people, especially those leading GM but also much of the auto industry media, before the fact.

Rattner doesn’t pretend that politics were not a factor. Some actions are described as politically-motivated, most notably the government’s insistence that GM’s headquarters remain in downtown Detroit and GM’s early repayment of some of the money—by using some of the money. Senator Barney Frank got GM to delay the closing of a small parts depot in his state. Some proposed actions fail what Rattner labels “the Washingon Post test:” how would they appear on the front page of the paper? But these were exceptions, not the rule. Rattner did what he could to minimize the role of politics, and largely succeeded.

Are there things Rattner is not telling us? No doubt. For example, it’s possible that Obama was more involved in some of the task force’s more controversial actions, such as the firing of Wagoner, and that Rattner is continuing his role of shielding the president from criticism. In general Rattner says little about what might have been his primary function, buffering the rest of the team from politicians and other parties interested in influencing the outcome so members could do their jobs. But overall I find Rattner’s book as complete and lacking in extraneous bias as an insider account could possibly be. For once we’re not entirely stuck on the outside, wondering, “What were they thinking?” It no doubt helped that Rattner’s position was temporary, and that he does not have to continue to work with the people portrayed in the book.

No one likes being told what to do by an outsider, even (especially?) when they know the outsider is right. Rattner’s book now serves as a well-researched and well-written permanent record of this outside intervention, and how well it worked. Since the book itself is unassailable, Rattner’s character becomes the target. I, for one, generally dislike character-based attacks, and would like to see such an informative insider account properly rewarded.

If you feel the same, buy the book.

Michael Karesh owns and operates TrueDelta, an online source of automotive pricing and reliability data

Motorbooks

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Time and time again, it’s the comparison that kept occurring to me as I played Gran Turismo 5 on my PS3. The fruit of years – and years of development, Sony’s Forza-killer was finally bestowed upon us this November. Befitting its immense gestation period, the game is a mix of out-dated user interfaces and standard cars and tracks, a sublime driving engine, and incredible detail on some of the newer premium cars. Originally targeted at Forza Motorsport 2, it came out after Forza 3, and it plays like something in between the two.

Polyphony, the game’s developer, went for the bulk approach here in order to clear the 1,000-car mark. Everyone begins the game with standard cars. I began the game with a ‘93 Silvia, whose wheels I couldn’t change, whose interior I could not view, and whose engine I could not turbocharge. It felt straight out of GT2, let alone GT5. It’s not actually until you move up to the premium cars that the game’s 2009 and 2010 development years are apparent.

Those premium cars are styled beautifully, with incredible attention to detail. Assume the cockpit view, and, if you’ve got a 1080P plasma HDTV, it’s as close as you can get to the real thing for under $100.

It’s much the same with other aspects of the game. The game’s user interface is so cluttered with tiny buttons, it harkens to an Acura’s center stack from the earlier parts of this decade. The execution is similarly lacking. Tap “cancel” to leave GT (career) mode, for example, and you don’t actually leave GT mode. You get to a red button, which you must hit again in order to leave GT mode. It wouldn’t be so bad, were it not for the fact that you actually have to leave GT mode to collect the prizes you win during career races! Meanwhile, I’ve never seen a game whose interface is so ridiculous that developers actually have to provide a zoom feature for users to decipher all of the buttons.

The online play provides more dismal results. Back in Forza 2’s heyday, I could download the fastest posted lap with a given car on a given track and try to chase it in order to better myself. Forza 3 later, and GT’s online mode is limited to some generic racing. Great. Though we shan’t enter into a PSNet vs. Xbox live discussion, suffice it to say online mode trailed Forza 2 and is left in the dust by Forza 3.

Finally, the customization options are the most lacking of all. Standard cars can be upgraded, but only with non-branded generic parts such as “High RPM Turbocharger” or “Supercharger”. Most pathetic of all: you can’t upgrade your brakes. Ever. So forget about six-piston Brembos like in Forza 3 (or 2, for that matter). Of course, licensing items costs money and takes time, but let’s not forget this game’s been eons in the making.

The tracks, like the cars, are definitely two-tiered, with some getting and incredible treatment and offering picturesque views while others offer what could only be called “2D Mania”.

So what’s the Dr. Jekyll to all of the Dr. Jekyll above? Two things: Pure racing and special events.

GT5’s driving engine remains sublime, on-par or better with Forza’s depending on who you ask. This game incorporates all kinds of racing – from the extreme (snow, dirt, weather changes, night racing, drifting, NASCAR to the zany (driving a VW Bus around the Top Gear airfield) to the traditional (flinging a Ferrari around Rome) to the downright cool (testing AMG’s at Mercedes’ home track). And every single mode of driving is phenomenal.

Drive a NASCAR car and you can feel the strange mix of the car’s heaviness and its gradually increasing fickleness as you pick up speed. Drive a VW Bus and you’re almost nervous about tip-over.Your controller with rumble with the torque steer of a juiced up FWD car, and your rear will break loose as you’d expect if you gun it too early upon exit. Brake too hard while turning and say hello to lift oversteer at the rear.There’s no Need For Speed-style fantasy physics here, it’s all the real deal.

Unfortunately, even the game’s best aspects were not immune to the pervasive issues that plague the rest of the game. The damage modelling is mostly cosmetic and ineffectual. The GT mode is a grind, involving racing and re-racing the same tracks over and over again to level up, to get better and bigger parts. And of course, the AI is as deficient as its always been in the series. Take the lead on it, stay on the driving line and it may never actually pass you, no matter how slow you’re going.

It’s tough to know what to make of GT5. Every single time it pleases with an exquisitely delivered race, you know Mr. Hyde lurks in the shadows – lo and behold, here’s an eternal loading screen then dizzying array of buttons and Japanese elevator music. It’s the only game I can describe as both immensely frustrating and immensely satisfying at the same time.

First things first: having stuck my neck out a quite a bit with a piece I wrote last year The Truth About Why Chrysler Destroyed The Turbine Car, I approached this book with a mixture of eagerness and trepidation to find out if my own theory held any water. It does (whew!). This well researched book by Steve Lehto confirms it: the myth that Chrysler had the bronze beauties scrapped because of import duties that needed to be paid is utter junk and a baseless urban myth. It even confirms my speculation that the Ghia bodies cost about $20k each, and therefore any import duties would have been insignificant:

“The reality was the import duties at that point would have been peanuts. They didn’t want the cars hanging around, getting into people’s hands and messing up the image of the program, people getting them and putting V-8s into them, that was the real reason” (Chrysler’s) Bill Carry explained.

It also confirms that only six museums responded with Chrysler’s offer to donate them (without cost) for display. So feeling vindicated on those accounts, how does the book stack up otherwise? Like the turbine program itself, it never really got me fully spooled up.

OK, that might be my problem, having long ago decided that the whole Chrysler Turbine program was more about the promotional value and the zeitgeist of the jet age than the likelihood that the automobile turbine engine was ever going to be mass produced. And this book reinforced that more than ever, even if that wasn’t the intent. Even the subtitle “The Rise and Fall of Detroit’s Coolest Creation” unwittingly (presumably) reinforces my jaded perspective: jets were cool in the fifties and early sixties, and Chrysler wanted in on the coolness, regardless of the obvious obstacles to mass production.

If that’s a little harsh, I admit that some genuine progress came out of the program, but it wasn’t so much at Chrysler itself. Although George Huebner Jr. was the public face of the program, and milked it for all the personal and corporate glory and publicity possible, it was Sam Williams, a quiet scientist that really made the Chrysler turbine workable in its first few incarnations. But he left early on, and founded Williams International, which has found considerable success, especially with its micro-jet engines for small jets. His ability to see the inherent problems in adapting the turbine to automobiles and instead focus on replacing the piston engine in small airplanes perfectly underscores the whole turbine issue: it was always way too expensive to put in production, period. Airplanes? that’s a different story.

Chrysler really never faced that reality properly during the Turbine Car’s heyday for a good reason: the huge amount of publicity it generated nationwide for several years was grossly in excess of what it was spending, so who cared whether it was financially viable or not. Detroit, like most businesses, lives on the short term buzz, and the Turbine Car was giving it plenty of that. The book even speculates that Chrysler’s dramatic resurgence during the years of the Turbine Car program may be attributed to it, to one degree or another. Quite plausible.

A substantial part of its pages are spent documenting the experiences of the ordinary folks who got to “own” a Turbine for a few months. It was a hugely popular program, and those that had one never forgot it. The reason is simple: they became instant celebrities in their towns and cities, the forerunners of today’s reality show stars. The shortcomings of the cars themselves were mostly lost in the haze of excitement; no wonder so many wanted to buy them. When Chrysler asked them if they would hypothetically pay $20 k for one ($140k adjusted), they all blanched. That was more than most of their houses cost back then. And Chrysler was only feeling them out; even they didn’t know if they could actually build them for that amount even on a large scale.

The book also details those shortcomings, and they were very substantial. Fuel consumption in city driving was abysmal. The cars had to be fed diesel or kerosene; ironically, the leaded gasoline then would have damaged them. Yet the multi-fuel abilities of the turbine is extolled too often here; one too many references to them being able to run on perfume or tequila. How cool is that?

There’s lots of detail about what an effort behind the scenes it took to keep the Turbines running, and avoiding public scrutiny of that aspect.

A minor gripe with the book: calling them “jet cars”. A jet engine is one that specifically uses its thrust to propel a vehicle or plane. A gas turbine is related, but not the same. Call me a grouch, but…

The book may indulge in the”cool factor and it’s obvious from reading the publicity reviews on the back cover, that it will feed many folks’ notions that the turbine car program was madly cool and the innocent victim of changing government standards or other externalities. Shades of GM’s EV-1 program and “Who Killed The Electric Car?” Did they read a different version? What I kept getting out of it was the the program’s overwhelming limitations that assured its inevitable death. I guess this book is able to be interpreted in multiple ways. Or maybe they didn’t really read it.

But the conclusion is presented starkly here, even if one chooses to ignore it: Chrysler finally admitted what it knew all along: the key parts of the turbine were way to expensive to build cost-effectively.

And since then, the internal combustion engine has solved all the problems that bedeviled it back the. Today’s engines are quiet, smooth,  economical, multi-fuel capable, long-lived, reliable, clean and very cheap to build. The turbine’s appeal as a replacement, regardless of building cost, evaporated with modern electronic controls and new technologies.

That’s not to count out the turbine in the future; but if it does become a viable option, presumably it won’t be because of its “coolness”. Note that I said “presumably”. Hydrogen fuel calls were mighty cool just a few years ago. And we’re about to embark on a very large scale public (and publicly-subsidized) test of EVs. The turbine will undoubtedly not be Detroit’s last “cool” creation.

So the book successfully reinforced my own skepticism about the Turbine program, although that was probably not the author’s intent. It’s a common problem: are we looking for facts or coolness? The facts are here, but getting them to support the cool factor not so much so.

Published by Chicago Review Press; who supplied the book.

]]> http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/10/book-review-chryslers-turbine-car-the-rise-and-fall-of-detroits-coolest-creation/feed/ 42 http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/10/book-review-where-the-suckers-moon/ http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/10/book-review-where-the-suckers-moon/#comments Thu, 14 Oct 2010 21:56:07 +0000 Jack Baruth http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/?p=368721

Book Reviewed: Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story, by Randall Rothenberg, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, 477 pages.

I don’t know what you get out of the current Subaru Legacy ad campaign, but what I get out of it is: “The Subaru Legacy is so banal, and sucks so unrepentantly hard, that we had to put extra crap on an old Kia Optima to create an alternative you wouldn’t automatically prefer.” This is not the first time Subaru has pointed a shotgun at its own feet, nor is it likely to be the last.

Where The Suckers Moon is, primarily, a story about advertising, but along the way we get a true sense of Subaru itself: a company stumbling from failure to failure, forever being rescued by market conditions, outrageously misinformed buyer perception, and completely random factors. It’s simply a company that is too lucky to fail, no matter how hard it tries.

Although it was originally just another one of the infamous Malcolm Bricklin’s get-poor-quick schemes, Subaru of America found itself an unwitting beneficiary of circumstances beyond its control. An early adoption of part-time 4WD, done at the suggestion of the Japanese Post Office, made the little “DL” and “GL” the darlings of the Northeastern ski set and those who wished to emulate them. Later on, the Voluntary Restraint Agreement meant that every Japanese car that could find its way onto a boat would eventually be sold at a healthy profit somewhere.

Subaru’s almost unbelievably bad advertising tagline, “Inexpensive, and built to stay that way”, wasn’t a bad way to sell extremely cheap cars as sixteenth-birthday gifts to bi-curious Vermont coeds, but as the rising yen pushed prices through the roof, Subaru decided to reinvent itself as a “desire” brand. Their subsequent choice of “Just Do It” creators Wieden+Kennedy, and the “What To Drive” campaign that follows, provides the meat of Randall Rothenberg’s delightful liitle book.

Time and again, Subaru reveals itself to be the most hilariously incompetent of Japanese automakers. In one vignette, Rothenberg describes how a Japanese designer proudly shows a visiting Subaru of America delegation the interior of the new XT, noting that he put in checkerboard seat fabric “for the American dude.” Another chapter details how Wieden+Kennedy’s “visionary” television director refuses to actually put any shots of the Subaru Legacy in his commercial, focusing instead on homoerotic shots of sweaty, muscular line workers.

Caught between the bumbling Japanese and the insane “creatives” are the Subaru dealers, most of them hucksters and confidence men who couldn’t get a Toyota dealership in the Seventies. Their simplest desires are repeatedly frustrated. They want more no-equipment sedans; Subaru gives them the SVX. They want regional advertising to move cars before summer sets in; Subaru spends the money on a magazine ad campaign for which they are later forced to apologize to everybody from MADD to the NHTSA.

At one point in the book, the author cannot restrain himself any longer and states a simple fact: Subarus are primarily sold to people who cannot afford (or, in the VRA era, cannot get) a Honda or Toyota. While that was entirely true in the early Nineties, we are now familiar with Subaru as the people who bring you the WRX, STi, and Legacy GT, to say nothing of the Outback and Forester which actually keep the lights burning at the stars-and-swoosh dealerships.

Still, as we take a look at the way in which Subaru continually manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (look at the STi and current Outback for some great examples) it’s worth noting that reality as described in Where The Suckers Moon hasn’t completely disappeared. It’s worth a read for any number of reasons. And for those of you pointing to Subaru’s current sales success as a refutation of everything I’ve said above… well, perhaps you’re right, but I’d recommend checking Rothenberg’s work out anyway. TTAC readers have recommended it no less than four times in the comments section. Consider this a fifth thumbs-up.

Available on Amazon.

Handed out to undeserved recipients and devalued by lazy writers alike, few words are as hackneyed as iconic or legendary. If everything is an iconic legend, nothing is. Sometimes, though, the words are exactly appropriate. The Canadian American Challenge Cup racing series which ran from 1966 to 1974, more popularly known simply as Can-Am, included cars and drivers that are truly iconic and the series was genuinely the stuff of legend. Though the big block V8 engines of Can-Am last roared over 35 years ago, even today the name Can-Am resonates strongly with car enthusiasts.

Attracted by an almost unlimited technical formula and some of the era’s richest purses, the world’s most innovative constructors and talented drivers flocked to the series. Team owners that have since succeeded in other series like Roger Penske, Jim Hall, Paul Newman and Carl Haas, were active in Can-Am. This was when drivers were not specialists who only raced in this or that series, and many of the Can-Am drivers also raced in Formula One. Not only were some of the drivers the same in both F1 and Can-Am, the two series also raced on some of the same tracks. The Can-Am cars were so technologically advanced, so powerful and so fast that the F1 drivers typically set faster times with their Can-Am cars than with their F1 rides. The series produced technical advancements that still impact racing. Can-Am was so larger than life, that it eventually produced the most powerful car ever designed to race on a closed course, a car which so dominated the series, it is said to have killed that very racing series that spawned it. As I said, the stuff of legend.

Befitting such a larger than life subject, one of the truly golden ages of 20th century auto racing, David Bull Publishing has released Can-Am Cars In Detail: Machines And Minds Racing Unrestrained, with photos by Peter Harholdt and text by respected racing journalist Pete Lyons. It’s a large format book, ~ 11″X11″, hardcover, 244 pages, with a slip case. Noted in passing is that this is yet another graphically rich book printed in China. Apparently the publishing industry is outsourcing to China too.

Because of the large format I’m tempted to call CACID a coffee table book but that would be doing Lyons and Harholdt and their publisher a huge disservice. Yes the book has gorgeous, large photographs of 22 of the coolest cars ever built, all either restored, as-raced or in one case, recreated, but it’s much more than a picture book. CACID gives a vivid sense of what Can-Am was like, showing the variety of cars raced (with their achievements or lack thereof), and their chronological development. What makes CACID different than more cursory looks at Can-Am is that in addition to the legendary Can-Am cars that everyone recognizes, like the Chaparral 2E, Lola T70, McLaren 6 and 8 models, and Porsche 917s, there are lesser remembered marques like Genie, Caldwell, McKee and Honker. Honker? There are cars that won races and championships, cars that were innovative but not very successful, and some backmarkers as well. Lyons and Harholdt’s selection of cars gives a comprehensive view of the series. The “In Detail” part is no brag, just fact. Harholdt’s photographs are visually arresting, the framing and lighting present the cars like the mechanical art that they are, and Lyons’ text treats each car’s racing history in a manner that gives a very complete history of the individual cars, their constructors and the series overall.

You get a visual taste of what’s inside before you even start to read. The slip case is wrapped with a large photo of Denny Hulme’s McLaren M8F, while the book’s jacket cover has a cropped photo of the unequal length and canted velocity stacks of the McLaren M20′s 565 cubic inch (9.26L) Chevy V8 (I told you they were big blocks). Framed by the car’s back wing (one of Can-Am’s many innovations), the brushed aluminum stacks look like sculpture. Inside the book on the page facing the table of contents is a full page photo of the all aluminum Holman-Moody Ford V8 from the Ford 429′er, one of the lesser known cars covered in the book. Based, somehow, on the cast iron production 429, this engine actually displaced 494CI. I hate to be trite and keep using words like stunning and arresting, but Harholdt’s photographs are top shelf car porn. The photographs appear to have been studio shot and the book could not have been possible without the cooperation of the owners of some irreplaceable cars.

The book is arranged chronologically, starting with 1966′s Chaparral 2E and ending with the Shadow DN4 that raced in the half-finished 1974 season. Thanks to owners’ foresight, vintage racing and the recognized value of vintage race cars to collectors’, a representative example of the racing hardware used in the Can-Am series still exists today, making the authors’ task a bit easier. Jim Hall’s race shop restored examples of all of his Chaparrals, which are represented in CACID by the 2E, (of which you can buy Hall-built exact replicas), the radical slipstream 2H, and the vacuum downforce and ultimately banned 2J. The Chaparrals were so innovative that some of their best known advancements contain fascinating subdetails. The 2E is usually noted for introducing high mounted wings to racing cars. Many also know that the 2E’s wing was under driver control, with high downforce in corners and trimmed for low drag on the straights. Driver control with a foot pedal was possible because the Chaparrals had torque converters, not clutches. A detail that is not as well known is the fact that the 2E’s wing struts were not mounted on the body, but rather to the wheel hubs, so the wing didn’t affect spring loading, it applied downforce directly to the tires. Wheel manufacturers and car companies alike imitated the 2E’s cast spoke wheel design. Hall has joked that if he’d bothered to copyright the design, he’d have made more money in royalties from BBS alone than he made racing cars.

Hall’s white cars were innovative, yet weren’t terribly successful in Can-Am, and he constantly butted heads with scrutineers as the series became increasingly concerned with rules. Bruce McLaren’s orange cars were more conventional (though just as beautiful), and they dominated the series, winning many races, often finishing 1-2 with McLaren and Hulme trading podium spots back and forth, and multiple championships. The book includes the M6A, and M8B McLarens in addition to the aforementioned M8F, and M20.

The relatively loose rules in Can-Am meant competitors were always looking for out of the box ideas for more speed. Based on the idea that minimal frontal area and a low profile meant maximum straightline speed, the AVS Shadow Mk 1, from 1969-70, used so-called “tiny tires”, about 30% less tall than other tires then used in Can-Am. The Shadow probably influenced the Tyrell six-wheeler raced later in F1.

There are three of Eric Broadley’s Lolas including the definition-of-automotive-beauty T70, and Ferrari is represented by the 612P, in unrestored condition as Chris Amon last raced it in 1971.

Porsche is represented by three iterations of the 917, the 917PA, the 917/10K, and the uber Porsche, the Mark Donohue / Roger Penske 917/30. The 917/30, at 1,100 horsepower, is acknowledged to be the most powerful closed course race car ever. Chew on that for a second. In almost 40 years, a more powerful race car, at least not one that had to turn right or left, has not been made. There has simply been nothing like the 917/30, then or now. Donohue was closely involved in the development of the car. The 917/30 had a driver controlled waste gate on the turbos that would give him about 1500 HP on demand and a driver adjustable rear sway bar that gave oversteer on demand. Donohue called it the “perfect race car”, and a “monument” to his career, already much accomplished.

To say that the 917/30 dominated Can-Am in 1973 is to state the obvious. Called by some “the car that killed Can-Am”, the 917/30 was so unlimited that it made a mockery not just of the car’s competition but of the concept of competition itself. More dominant than Ferrari in Schumacher’s time. Eight races, eight poles, six victories, one championship. The particular 917/30 in CACID was built for Donohue to use in the 1974 season and is finished in the Penske team’s blue and yellow Sunoco livery. He never drove this car, though. After winning the Can-Am championship in 1973 with the 917/30 and a remarkable 38% of the races that he entered in his career, Donohue retired from driving (he later came back to race in F1 for Penske, a decision that was ultimately and sadly fatal).

This 917/30 was formerly owned by the Porsche factory museum. Current owner Matt Drendel thinks he’s the luckiest man in the world. “What’s it like to drive? I get asked that a lot. It’s like a LearJet on takeoff. It feels like it’s never running out of power, and it feels like that in every gear. It feels like you’re being pushed by the hand of God. One time I floored it in second gear and the front wheels came off the ground!” The 917/30 is not an economy car but Drendel makes it sound like spending $1,000 on racing fuel for 90 minutes on the track with the 917/30 is more cost effective in terms of mental health than a year’s worth of 50 minute sessions with a shrink.

Can-Am wasn’t just about the cars. The drivers were among the greatest ever. The starting grid of just abut any race in the series’ history reads like a motorsports hall of fame roster. Represented in the book along with Hall (he’d previously won a US road racing championship) and McLaren, are Denny Hulme, Dan Gurney, Phil Hill, John Surtees, Mario Andretti (who drove a couple of the cars in the book, including a Honker owned by Paul Newman), Sam Posey (he still owns the Caldwell D7 he raced in Can-Am), Chris Amon, Vic Elford, George Follmer, Pedro Rodriguez, David Hobbs, Jody Scheckter, Brian Redman and of course the aforementioned Mark Donohue. Again, the stuff of legends.

At $100, Can-Am Cars In Detail is not cheap but it’s exceptionally well written, with first rate photography and the book is a good value if you’re at all interested in auto racing history. It seems that most contemporary racing series are infected with ennui or malaise. Formula One, NASCAR, IndyCar, all are targets of substantial and substantive criticism. Bernie Ecclestone, Brian France and Randy Bernard can all easily afford to spend a hundred bucks. If they want to get an idea what an exciting racing series looked like, and more importantly felt like, they could do much worse than pop for a copy of Lyons and Harholdt’s book.

Predicted by site founder Robert Farago when few people thought it could actually happen, GM’s bankruptcy is now history. So, time for the histories.

Paul Ingrassia certainly seems qualified to provide one. The Wall Street Journal’s man in Detroit for years, he won a Pulitzer (with Joseph White) for his coverage of the auto industry’s early 1990’s brush with disaster and subsequent recovery. That coverage provided the basis for 1994’s Comeback: the Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry, a definitive account of that period.

Does Crash Course: the American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster similarly deserve a place on your bookshelf?

Well, it depends. Did you know:

• most Japanese cars circa 1970 were front-wheel-drive

• the Japanese invested in direct fuel injection in the 1980s

• Iacocca started the SUV boom with Jeep, and gave them the 4.0 engine

• the Saturn SL2 was larger than the SL1

• the Toyota Prius runs entirely on electric power below 30 mph

Of course you didn’t. When discussing cars, Ingrassia gets such facts wrong as often as he gets them right. So, should we wonder what else isn’t correct? Or should we grant that someone can know the car industry inside and out, without knowing cars?

The first 160 of the book’s 280 pages review the industry’s history from its roots through 2005, with an emphasis on labor relations. There’s nothing particularly insightful in them, and certainly nothing new.

The key point: the UAW, shaped through confrontation, and with a monopoly on the supply of labor, kept demanding more and more, and industry executives, lacking courage and in denial, accepted and appeased them. For example, GM executives might have been able to bankrupt the union in 1998, but ultimately “lost their nerve” because “the UAW was the devil GM knew.”

In 2005 the UAW successfully fought an attempt to ban smoking on the assembly lines. Ingrassia’s take: “the union often stood for the right to be irresponsible, and the company accepted the ridiculous.” The most damaging concessions: retirement after 30 years on the line and a “Jobs Bank” where displaced workers continued to receive nearly full pay. When a threat to the existing ways of doing things emerged in the form of Saturn, both management and labor successfully worked to kill it. Secondary points: industry executives were out of touch with the market, and product development funds were spread too thinly due to an excessive number of brands.

The book starts earning its purchase price once it reaches 2005. Though still not insightful, but it is at least mildly interesting. Rick Wagoner is criticized for making major blunders (the FIAT debacle, the failure to sell Saab and Hummer, GMAC home mortgages, huge financial and market share losses), yet refusing to make big changes, and continuing to believe that gradualism would work. Jerry York gets props for trying (without success) to make GM accept reality and take necessary steps to avoid bankruptcy. Cerberus and the executives it hired vastly underestimated the difficulty of fixing Chrysler, and were in way over their heads. Alan Mulally faced reality and did what needed to be done before it was too late.

The last two chapters are easily the best in the book. Heavily based on confidential interviews with the people involved, they start with the first Congressional hearings in late 2008 and end with the bankruptcies. We get positive portraits of the principal Presidential Task Force members, whose lack of industry experience, as with Mulally, proved to be an advantage. Lacking this experience, “they would ignore all Detroit’s conventional wisdom about what couldn’t be done and take their guidance from common sense instead of car sense.” They did know mismanagement when they saw it. The more Wagoner touted the Volt as the solution to the company’s immediate crisis, “the more Rattner and Bloom became convinced he was removed from reality.”

We get a somewhat detailed account of how the task force, with common sense and the courage to force major changes, squeezed all of the parties hard. It forced both management and labor to take steps that should have been taken years earlier. It forced debt holders to take major haircuts, because keeping the companies operating was the top priority. The “ridiculous” Jobs Bank? Finally gone. Non-essential brands? Gone. Mountains of debt? Gone. Wagoner? Gone. In short, “the task force had brought more common sense to GM than the company had seen in decades.” Government intervention was necessary because the UAW, company executives, and debt holders would never have worked out a solution on their own, even though (in the case of the first two) their livelihoods were at stake.

Crisis was always necessary to get the UAW and executives to make any changes at all, and even with a life-threatening crisis they weren’t willing or able to make sufficient changes on their own. So what, now, that the companies have been saved? In an afterward, Ingrassia doubts that the cultures of the UAW or the “lifer” executives who remained in control had undergone the needed revolutions.

The account throughout is very much that of a professional journalist. Unlike with Alex Taylor’s Sixty to Zero (reviewed here), the personality and opinions of the author are well hidden. There’s minimal wondering what might have happened, for better or worse, if various people had acted differently. The exceptions: GM could have avoided bankruptcy if it had followed Ford’s lead, and Chrysler was nearly permitted to go under. But, once the decision was made to save both companies, what might have been done differently? What opportunities for change were missed? These questions aren’t asked, much less answered. The focus is on what did happen, on the (hopefully correct) facts.

The largest failing of Crash Course: it doesn’t dig much beneath the surface. Ingrassia’s new, shorter book (280 vs. 474 pages) is in general considerably less interesting and insightful than Comeback, which continues to be a joy to read. One likely factor: while the old book thoroughly delved into the biographies, work, and personalities of many mid-level managers, the new book focuses more tightly on harder-to-access people at the very top of the companies. (Two exceptions: a guy on the line and a car dealer.) Despite numerous interviews—they were “confidential,” and so are not listed—the major players remain caricatures. “Complacency, arrogance, and hubris,” “isolation,” a lack of “common sense,” and “lack of courage,” though certainly present, are the same, overly simple characterizations Detroit’s critics have been making since  Brock Yates penned “Grosse Pointe Myopians” back in 1968. And probably before that.

These characterizations don’t go far enough. These people aren’t stupid; smart people somehow kept doing stupid things. Replace these smart people with other smart people, and more often than not the new people will do the same stupid things. Why does experience apparently suppress common sense? What were the UAW and corporate leaders actually thinking as events progressed? Why did they feel they had no choice but to act the way they did? Why are the “cultural revolutions” Ingrassia calls for still not happening?

The best answers Ingrassia offers: “courage” and the “common sense” of an outsider’s perspective. Both Mulally and the task force came from outside the industry, and so neither accepted that the way things had always been done was the way they had to be done. Beyond this, they had the courage to make big changes, and to face down those who opposed these changes—though both also appeased the union, if to a lesser extent.

Was “courage” truly the key difference between Wagoner and Mulally? And the courage to admit failure and step side the key difference between Wagoner and Bill Ford? Briefly mentioned: the Ford family and the priority it placed on retaining control through its stock ownership. Left implicit: while GM’s executives claimed until the last minute that bankruptcy was not an option, in Ford’s case bankruptcy was truly not an option. Perhaps this and not the courage of this or that individual explains why only Ford did whatever was necessary to avoid bankruptcy? Even though they held large amounts of stock and options themselves, perhaps GM’s executives did not feel the same amount of pressure to safeguard GM’s stockholders?

With his experience and contacts, Ingrassia should have been able to offer deeper, more thorough explanations for why the various players did what they did. Did he not try, or even in retirement does he remain bound by the culture of the mainstream auto media, and so unwilling to dig too deeply or say too much? Ingrassia criticizes the local Detroit media for “helping to create the very insularity that had made Detroit executives and UAW officials oblivious to the sentiment elsewhere in America.” The cultures of the UAW and executive suites are not the only ones still in need of revolution.

Editor’s Note: Part One of Michael Karesh’s review of Sixty To Zero can be found here.

Journalists write stories. A coherent story is a partial truth at best. If it’s portrayed as the whole story, it’s a lie.

In Sixty to Zero, veteran auto industry journalist Alex Taylor III provides an unusual level of insight into the relationships between top auto industry journalists and the executives they cover. He acknowledges getting too close to these executives more than once, and blames this for several embarrassingly off-base articles. But even in his most self-reflective moments, Taylor fails to recognize an even larger source of distortion.

Taylor’s explanation for the collapse of GM is simple: the company’s senior executives were removed from reality, wedded to the past, and unwilling to act quickly and decisively to fix their firms’ mounting problems. Ford’s Mulally, according to Taylor, indicates the path Wagoner should have taken at GM. Though true to a point, this explanation doesn’t nearly go far enough. It’s not only simple, it’s too simple.

In Taylor’s view, “the history of nearly every auto company revolves around the CEO.” He has sought and received far less contact with people lower in the auto company organizations—even Bob Lutz, since he was merely a vice chairman, is a “lesser executive” who normally would not have received frequent press attention.

Why such a strong focus on the CEO? For starters, Taylor is clearly moved by status and prestige, the qualities embodied by the CEO position. Taylor’s approach to journalism is also strongly influenced by the desire to tell a good story and sell magazines. Individuals are easier to understand and more enjoyable to write and read about than teams or organizations. Just as Taylor was most interested in talking to CEOs, readers tend to be most interested in reading about CEOs.

Taylor does note in passing that the role of the CEO has been exaggerated: “When a company is performing well, there is an understandable impulse to attribute the success to the CEO and to examine his actions in light of that.” He also notes that “projecting the capabilities of the CEO onto an entire management is especially problematic for a company as large and complex as GM.” Despite these realizations, however, Taylor continued to do both.

Most of all, Taylor never seems to fully grasp that CEOs—even the good ones—have a severely limited and distorted view of what goes on inside their companies. The ideal access he describes, to shadow the CEO as he goes about his daily work, is a step in the right direction. With such access, he might see what a CEO actually says and does, and not have to rely on what the CEO claims, in interviews, to be saying and doing. But even if the CEO does and says what he would normally do and say while being shadowed, this assumes that all of the important activities inside these companies involve the CEO, or at least occur with the CEO in the room.

I must admit to an unfair advantage. Back in the late 1990s I spent 18 months practically living inside various parts of General Motors while conducting field research for my Ph.D. thesis. I attended over 400 working-level meetings within program management, design, marketing, and engineering, and spent entire days as a fly on the wall inside the Design Center. I rarely saw a senior executive. I never saw the CEO.

In one instance, Taylor shadowed Wagoner during a meeting with design executives. But did the real design work happen with Wagoner in the room? Should it have? During the days I spent inside GM, real work only happened when executives were not in the room. When the executives arrived, the real work stopped and the “dog and pony show” began. Beyond this, it quickly became apparent that within GM, and I later learned within just about any organization of any size, scant information makes it up even two levels, much less all the way from the product development teams to the CEO. Whatever information does make it has been heavily massaged. By continuously relying on CEOs as his predominant source of information, Taylor has been fated to keep repeating the same mistakes.

Compounding the problem, Taylor and his colleagues influence the industry that they cover. Executives want to have positive articles written about them, and so further exaggerate how much they can personally know and do. No one gets positive press by acknowledging their limits. After one debacle, GM’s Jack Smith continued to assert that he was well-informed about what was going throughout the organization, as if this were really possible, and tht he was not “out of the loop.” Wagoner convinced Taylor that “he was no forty-thousand-foot manager; he was intimately involved in key areas of the business” and comfortably interacting with everyone from engineers to dealers. Taylor never appears to have tested such claims by actually talking with people lower in the organization.

This exaggeration of the CEO’s role and the CEO’s abilities has been repeatedly validated by the resulting magazine articles. Cults of the CEO have been born and sustained. Encouraged by the press, auto companies concentrate decision-making (or a lack thereof) at the top of the organization even more than they might otherwise.

What both the journalists and most CEOs miss: the best senior executives develop teams of experts much lower in the organization, enable these teams to do their jobs well, then let them do their jobs. Mulally has made some tough decisions at Ford, but he has also focused on eliminating infighting and building teamwork within the organization. Mulally isn’t a car guy, and he knows he’s not a car guy. If he’s as smart as he’s reputed to be, he lets the car guys lower in the organization do their jobs without even pretending to be intimately involved in what they do.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the story one is likely to hear while interviewing a senior executive. Even if the executive does talk about “the organization,” such an account cannot compete with the portrayal of an individual executive for color and doesn’t make for a dramatic article the way killing a brand, publicly taking on the UAW, or a “ritual firing” does. Taylor repeatedly wishes for more “ritual firings”—his term, not mine.

The unrecognized problem with ritual firings: at best they assume that the individual fired was responsible for the mistake, and that other individuals would not have made the same mistake. At worst, they realize this, but don’t care. It’s just fun to watch heads roll. Taylor notes that executive firings were historically much more common at Ford, and that Mulally’s suppression of political infighting improved the company’s performance. Strangely, Taylor does not seem to learn from this that ritual firings don’t improve company performance.

Taylor also calls for auto company CEOs to take more risks, but this seems more than a little cliché. What sort of risks would he have them take? Jack Smith and Rick Wagoner get little credit for GM’s big bet on China. Don Peterson gets labeled an odd “iconoclast” for taking Ford in unusual directions. Roger Smith took many risks while CEO of GM, and gets severely criticized for each of them. Lutz receives mild praise for having some minor successes while avoiding disasters. Taylor wants risks without failures. But the real possibility of failure is what makes a risk a risk.

Taylor’s suggestions that executives should both take more risks and fire more people for mistakes comprise a recipe for firing lots of people. The “ritual firings” he wishes for would discourage the risk-taking he also wishes for. These are contradictory recommendations.

In reality, while there are some bad executives, all too often there are good executives placed within social systems that make it virtually impossible to make good decisions. Unless senior executives fix the underlying problem, which is the organization, not the individuals within it, they’ll just keep firing executive after executive.

Auto industry journalists like Taylor, by celebrating CEOs and largely ignoring the rest of the large organizations they lead, and by repeatedly focusing on the symptoms rather than the underlying problem, have themselves been part of the problem.

By focusing so intently on CEOs, and relying on interviews with them as his primary sources of information, Taylor has, without ever realizing it, spent decades building overly close relationships with the wrong people. Assuming, of course, that the goal was to accurately report what was going on inside these companies, and not making friends with important people in the process of selling more magazines.

I’d like to learn what’s really going on inside these companies, and how and how well they’re actually operating. Such a story makes it into the automotive press perhaps once every five to ten years. We have had insiders share bits of their knowledge, insights, and perspective here at TTAC from time to time. But true investigative journalism, where a writer builds relationships with people throughout these large organizations, and is able to report what’s really going on as a result? There are a number of reasons this still hasn’t happened—among them the very real possibility of “witch hunts” like the one Taylor describes—but I’m still hoping.

With Sixty to Zero, leading auto industry journalist Alex Taylor III claims to provide “an inside look at the collapse of General Motors – and the Detroit auto industry.” The book is well worth reading, but not because it actually provides this inside look. Instead, this book, atypically as much personal memoir as history, lets us peer inside the life and mind of a top auto journalist. A close read suggests why such journalists provide little insight into what really goes on inside the auto companies.

Taylor’s coverage of the auto industry for the past three decades (like much of business journalism) has been based heavily on interviews with senior executives, and especially with CEOs. In his book, he describes how journalists seek to build close relationships with executives, and avoid jeopardizing these relationships. Admiring articles written to build relationships with executives even have an insider label: “beat sweeteners.” Smart executives work this desire to build relationships to their advantage. As Taylor notes, “There’s nothing like a little personal attention from a top executive to win over a journalist.”

These relationships between journalists and executives come across as intensely personal. In describing each executive, Taylor focuses on their mannerisms, how they dressed, and whether he personally liked them. Roger Smith had a “high, squeaky voice and jittery mannerisms.” Lee Iacocca: “an insecure man who wore his neuroses on his sleeve.” Bob Stempel: “a big, beefy man [who] would become visibly angry, his face turning red, when he became irked” and “the classroom grind who gets ahead not by virtue of his smarts or quick wit but because he works harder than everyone else.” Lloyd Reuss: “dressed like a riverboat gambler…but underneath he was another GM suit who always saw good times just around the corner.” Bob Eaton: “a peculiar personality that put some people off…his usual expression was of vague stomach upset.” Jürgen Schrempp: “Iacocca’s ego and ambition and none of his insecurity…an imposing man with enormous energy and an irresistible personality.” Dieter Zetsche: “an intense intelligence with an instinctive flair for personal relations…[I] never failed to be charmed by his candor, wit, and the literal twinkle in his eye…he said all the right things.” Rick Wagoner: “smart, personable, and thoughtful.” Mulally: “the personality of an Eagle Scout who had memorized How to Win Friends and Influence People and dressed like a scoutmaster.”

Bob Lutz is a special case. The lusty personal description, too lengthy to reproduce here, includes “the body of a gymnast,” “übermale,” and Savile Row suits “to show off his physique.” Summing up: “Favored with exceptional physical equipment and a psyche that allowed him to give it full expression, Lutz became the center of attention wherever he went in automotive circles. It was a role that he enjoyed and played to the hilt.”

With Iacocca and Lutz in particular these relationships formed “a special club in which [the executive] controlled the membership.” Taylor further describes the relationship between the press and Lutz as “a longtime romance that Lutz cleverly exploited…he pretended we were equal partners in his five-star world of fast cars and international travel.” Taylor guarded a special relationship with Iacocca but ultimately opted not to join “the Lutz club.” As he candidly explains, “I was intimidated by his überness,” “I found his need for attention to be exhausting,” and “hordes of other writers were enamored of Lutz; I didn’t want to get in line.”

These relationships were not always smooth ones. Those times when Taylor did write a critical article he often received a vigorous response from the covered executive. In the most colorful example, Taylor described how Stempel “once forced me to sit and listen while he read one of my articles aloud, correcting me on every point he disputed.” He then notes that this performance in conjunction with Stempel’s physical size and CEO position “created the unmistakable impression that he was bullying me.” Later on, GM’s status as a major advertiser led the magazine to arrange a “sit-down” among Taylor, two other editors, and six of the auto makers’ top executives. In another case, Ford CEO Trotman first tried to use personal connections to kill a story, and when this failed began a “great witch hunt” in search of the leak. Taylor does not acknowledge any way in which these responses shaped his writing, but could they have had no effect?

Most unusually, Taylor acknowledges how often he has been wrong. With both Jack Smith and Rick Wagoner he was acutely embarrassed by incorrectly reporting that GM had turned a corner; another Fortune contributor had to write that the company might go bankrupt. He was sold on Zetsche’s plans for Chrysler. Though he was usually unduly optimistic, this wasn’t always the case. Taylor thought Mulally would fail at Ford because he was an outsider who didn’t dress or talk the way a CEO ought to (in Taylor’s personal view).

Taylor attempts to explain these errors. Blame generally goes to personal attachment to the CEO in question—getting too close—and a desire to write a positive story. He acknowledges “gulping” the “GM Kool-Aid” and allowing his personal feelings for a CEO to influence his opinions about the company. With hindsight he realizes that “executives almost always look relaxed and confident; that’s part of their job,” and so he should not have read much into GM’s CEO appearing relaxed and confident. He recognizes that executives like Lutz are acting out roles—but still seems to have accepted much of what they said at face value.

In the end, we are left wondering how much of the mainstream media’s coverage has been distorted by personal relationships and personal feelings. It seems to be a very small, tight club, where people cannot help but become friends with many of the executives they are reporting on. Does anyone who gets close enough to gather inside information necessarily end up too close? Can people write appropriately critical stories about their friends? To his credit, Taylor seems quite aware how these factors have affected his coverage, and assigns them much of the blame for his missteps.

But this isn’t the whole story. The second part of this review explores other, perhaps more serious limitations inherent in Taylor’s methods—which he doesn’t seem to recognize.

While the shape of racing cars has been the subject of endless technical and aesthetic discussion, Voelker points out that the history of the colors and liveries that have been applied over those shapes has not been particularly well documented. Considering the emotional and aesthetic impact of the colors and graphics used, this is surprising. As Voelker says, who would want to watch a plain white Ferrari race?

Documenting the development and history of racing cars’ graphic design presents a challenge to historians. Manufacturer and team archives are relatively bare of original drawings or concepts, the liveries being the usual province of engineers, the cars’ actual designers’ whims, and more often as the years went by, sponsors.

This lack of attention to the background of graphic design in racing is somewhat ironic in light of how iconic the graphic designs of some race cars have been. The light blue and orange Gulf sponsored Ford GT40s immediately come to mind as do the black and gold John Player Special sponsored Lotus F1 cars, or the Camaro and other racers carrying #6 and Sunoco’s blue and yellow livery. As iconic as those cars’ graphic designs continue to be, and Go Faster features examples of all of them, Voelker stresses how many famous race car liveries were almost accidental afterthoughts.

Tony Lapine, who headed Porsche design in the 1970s, was responsible for some of the greatest racing cars in history, like the legendary 917 variants. Though the shapes of the cars were meticulously crafted, the liveries were effected in a casual manner. The famous “Hippie” 917LH had its psychedelic purple and green swirls applied by Lapine in the pits just prior to its first race. Sometimes the teams’ casual senses of humor were not appreciated at the corporate level. Martini, the spirits company, has been a long time sponsor of auto racing. When Count Rossi, the head of Martini, saw how the Porsche team had painted a 917/20 in pink, with the dotted lines of a butcher’s diagram of a pig, he insisted that if they didn’t repaint the car, they must remove the Martini logos immediately.

In the early days, at least in international racing, cars wore national colors. That’s why Ferrari race cars are painted in rosso corsa, and Jaguars are still offered in British Racing Green. German race cars were silver like the famous Mercedes and Auto Union racers. Nowadays white with two blue racing stripes is a color scheme associated with Mustangs and Shelbys (as is the reverse white over blue layout). The blue and white combination was America’s original national racing colors and before it was used on Mustangs, Briggs Cunningham used that color scheme as did the Grand Sport Corvettes in the early 1960s.
Though American racing cars had long featured stickers and logos of sponsoring companies, Lotus’ Colin Chapman is generally credited with bringing corporate liveries to Formula One. Perhaps Chapman’s exposure to American racing at Indianapolis and related marketing was a factor, but in any case, the Lotus Gold Leaf cars were the first F1 cars to feature a sponsor’s color schemes. As mentioned, the later JPS Loti are among the most famous graphic designs in racing history. The Player sponsorship would start a long involvement of the tobacco industry with racing. Marlboro continues to sponsor Ferrari F1 team  – though without any logos because of the anti-smoking nannies, and Winston had a long time series sponsorship in NASCAR that pretty much grew that series into a  major force.

Still, in the 1970s, F1 cars were small and fairly cigar shaped. Sports cars racing at circuits like LeMans had larger bodies and the greater billboard space attracted sponsors. As John Wyer’s team moved from racing Fords to Porsches, the Gulf livery followed, and cemented in enthusiasts’ minds that if a car wore blue and orange, it was fast.

Voelker does cite BMW as an exception in that the Bavarian company has not treated the graphic design of its race cars as an afterthought. The book includes photos of Andy Warhol and David Hockney painting their respective M1 and 850 Csi cars that were part of BMW’s well known Art Car project.

Other historical photos go back to the earliest days of auto racing, to Baron Pierre de Caters’ 1904 90HP Mercedes. The heart of the book, though, is not historical photos.  This is a book about graphic design and Voelker uses a novel graphic method of showing the impact of the liveries of race cars. Starting with his own extensive collection of toy and model race cars, Voelker painted each of the cars with a blanking coat of white chalk and had Daniel Schludi take hundreds of detailed close-up photos both before and after painting. It’s absolutely fascinating to look at the ghostly images of famous historic race cars whose shapes are deeply etched into our brains and see just how much the overlaying graphic designs have affected our perceptions of those shapes.

Since Voelker, like everyone, has his own tastes, there are some cars well represented with varying body styles and liveries, particularly the 917, 911, and 908 Porsches. Those multiples allow you to see just how the differing liveries look on the same basic underlying shapes. Also, there are examples of the same livery on different cars, like the aforementioned Wyer Gulf racers, and the Martini colors (red, dark blue, light blue and white) on Porsches, a Lancia and even a VW Type II Transporter.

The photography is beautifully done and in addition to over 100 pages of large scale photographs, some double spreads, of the cars both nude and painted, are 25 pages of thumbnail images of all 131 of Voelker’s scale models used in this book in full liveries.

His use of scale models allowed Voelker to look at race cars in a way not really possible in real life. Though it’s possible to see race cars sometimes test without liveries, and while you might actually find a tifosi who would watch a white Ferrari race, you’re definitely not going to get the owner of an irreplaceable historic racer to let you repaint it matte white. What are the chances that one could even find, in presentable condition, a VW bus in team colors? So using toys and scale models is a clever solution to an interesting question.

The use of models, though, is also the books only real drawback. Not all models are really made to scale. In design, some features scale well, and some don’t, and not all model companies make true scale models. They want the final product to look good, and if that means slightly larger than scale wheels or the like, oh well. Sometimes the fact that they are models is a bit too obvious. Also, Voelker’s been collecting model cars since he was a boy. These are not obsessed Hot Wheels collectors who won’t let his kids open the blister packs model cars. They’ve been played with. Though many of them are obviously high end, high detail models that I’m sure Voelker treasures, a number of the models are a bit worse for wear, with chipped paint and obvious signs of hard play.

Though the scale and scratches sometimes get intrusive, the overall effect of Voelker’s ‘white out’ is literally illustrative. It will give you a new perspective on scores of your favorite historic race cars.

Go Faster – The Graphic Design of Racing Cars by Sven Voelker
Gestalten ISBN 978-3-89955-279-9
144 pages

For its day, the BMW E30 3-series was an impressive blend of German craftsmanship, understated and cohesive style with remarkable performance. Then again, the E30 may lack straight line performance but the handling remains stellar. And the look is almost timeless. But it needs more than 200 horsepower to truly shine outside of its numerous wins at the 24 Hours Of LeMons. Perhaps 345 horses will help the cause. So let’s put a lightweight, torque intensive V8 under the hood to fix that singular shortcoming.

Steve and Garret Van Swearingen found me via Piston Slap, and showed us all they had the resources to make it happen. Furthermore, these gentlemen possess the foresight to realize that others are similarly demented: though perhaps not as adventurous. Enter their self-published PDF document, E30-LS1, the definitive record on how to install a Chevy LS-X into the near perfect BMW E30.

Because of all the maniacal, pro-Chevy LS swap Piston Slap rants I’ve bestowed upon TTAC readers, Steve gave me a copy of the conversion article, gratis. No, I didn’t rush out and buy an E30, a late-model Pontiac GTO donor car (preferred) and clear my garage of my current projects, though his work is so detailed and intriguing that I considered it. Too bad the conversion isn’t a walk in the park: and his document is complete information overload.

With that in mind, legal liabilities come with this knowledge. Like anyone who lives in a cubicle, Steve and Garret understand CYA statements, which occupy the document’s first chapter. Such is life.

Without giving away the entire bill of sale, let’s hit the highlights of the E30-LS1 instruction manual. Most noticeably, the document is filled with CAD drawings of everything from the (modified) Pontiac GTO oil pan, brake booster linkages and transmission mounts. And that’s only a short list. While I didn’t make any of the parts to verify accuracy, anyone knowledgeable in CAD sees that Steve and Garret did their homework.

There are impressive hand drawings: while some are crude enough to require a second look, all are clear, detailed and valuable.  Take the custom intake tube leading to the LS-X’s centrally located throttle body: decent renderings, but with valuable notes that add to the document’s (somewhat) easy to read nature.  You know, for a deeply technical discussion.

Photographs abound, showing how the finished product looks: I especially like the photos of the rethought, re-engineered brake booster/master cylinder at the firewall, as that is a fairly complicated component to make for your average weekend wrench turner. But the stunning 3D renderings of the redesigned transmission mount might be the coolest diagram. Other renderings show how the T-56 6-speed transmission bolts into the E30 body, step-by-step. While not showing an exploded view diagram, this looks cleaner and easier to digest.

But pictures and drawings aren’t gonna get it done.  So they wrote easy to understand, somewhat un-technical copy explaining what parts are needed. It even tells you where to buy them. This saves a tremendous amount of time, even in the Internet age.

And even more details are sweated, telling you where a certain GM part fits under the E30’s bonnet, and what modification (hose, screw, clamp, etc) is needed to make it right. If words take too long, odds are there’s a picture to speed up the process. A great example is the content given to fabricate the GM-BMW hybrid A/C system under hood.  Yes, you have OEM levels of refinement here too.

Not every idea is set in stone: I imagine one can cut a corner or two with a zip-tie.  That is, if you’re a complete slacker. And that’s your call: everything needed to make that judgment is available.

But, on a limited production basis, Steve and Garret are offering a number of parts for the E30-LS1 swap. They went as far as removing the real-world tested parts on their personal E30: engine and transmission mounts, brake booster linkage system, second differential mount and the radiator mount.  The parts are removed to build welding fixtures from them, and many of the parts were redesigned to be laser-cut, in order to make it feasible to produce multiple copies.

Why is that relevant?  Because, much like a regular shade tree mechanic, Steve and Garret originally made these parts with crude tools like a hacksaw and file. So they are hoping to sell the kit (including the document reviewed here) for between $1200 and $1500. The standalone document is $99, which is certainly the best use of your time and money, should you buy into the E30-LS1 value proposition.

I see the light, and would take the plunge if I could. If this kind of mechanical mayhem is up your alley, pick up an E30-LS1 guide or the conversion parts by emailing E30LS1@gmail.com.

Steve and Garret Van Swearingen provided TTAC with a complimentary copy of their E30-LS1 Guide for evaluation purposes.

At the start of the 21st century, Motor Sport, the UK racing magazine, looked back and asked an expert panel to rank the most important people in Formula One history. Behind F1 majordomo Bernie Ecclestone and Enzo Ferrari, third on the list of 99 was Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman, aka Chunky, founder of Lotus (that’s where the ACBC on the Lotus logo comes from – where the name Lotus comes from is somewhat shrouded in legend and myth).

Of the remaining 96 people, at least 7 were employees or close associates of Chapman. Graham Hill started out building transmissions at Lotus. Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth (i.e. Cosworth) were also early employees. Along with Hill, the drivers who raced for Chapman make up a veritable Hall of Fame: The aforementioned Hill, Jimmy Clark, Mario Andretti, Jochen Rindt, Ronnie Petersen, and Nigel Mansell are just a few. Sir Jackie Stewart drove for him in Formula 2.

Chapman’s racing influence extended well beyond international formula racing. Ideas he either originated or championed have become standard techniques in auto racing. Though he was not the first to race a midengine car at Indy, he was the first to win the 500 with one. Jim Hall’s landmark Chaparrals used suspensions pretty much copied from Lotus F1 cars (Hall had raced F1 in Lotus cars as a privateer).

The Lotus 25 was the first successful modern monocoque racecar design and Chapman was one of the first constructors to use the engine as a structural component of the race car. Well experienced with composites from their road cars, Lotus was arguably the first to build a race car around a carbon fiber tub. Ironically, because the technology wasn’t proven, the safety of the early carbon tubs was suspect, though of course we now know how much safer those tubs have made open wheel racing. With the possible exception of Jim Hall, nobody did as much to make the racing world understand the need for aerodynamic advantage.

It was Chapman, however, who took it a step further and introduced the concept of ground effects generated downforce, created with side pods containing airfoils, underbody contouring and side skirts. Besides the win at Indy, under Chapman Lotus won seven Formula One constructors’ championships and six drivers’ championships. Lotus was successful in Formula Two, giving Chapman a heads up on new talent, and the Lotus Components division sold many Formula Fords, Formula Juniors and Lotus 7s to amateur racers.

Lotus also did well in sports car racing. Lotus won class and index of performance titles at LeMans with the beautiful and aerodynamic Lotus 11, and later won class titles with race prepared Elites (actually they were a bit more than “race prepared” since they had thinner and lighter fiberglass monocoques). In production based racing Lotus also successfully campaigned the Lotus 26R (Elan), and the Lotus Cortina in both the UK and the US. If you search around the net it’s easy to find photos of Graham Hill or Jim Clark at the wheel of a Lotus Cortina, usually going around a corner, often with the inside front wheel a bit off the ground.

Chapman changed the business of auto racing. The deal he arranged with with Ford for the development of the Cosworth DFV was an early version of branding race car engines with big company names, like Ilmor engines carrying first the Chevy and then the Mercedes brands. It can be said that Colin Chapman brought modern corporate sponsorship to Formula One, entering the first car to wear a sponsor’s livery. Not only did the Red Leaf sponsored cars wear the cigarette brand’s colors, Lotus also offered a Red Leaf edition of the Elan. Europas would later wear the colors of John Player Specials. His deals with John Player tobacco and the iconic black & gold JPS Lotus racers that sponsorship funded, may have been a factor in convincing Winston to sponsor NASCAR.

Before the Firebird TransAm wore black and gold, Lotus race and road cars were painted in that distinctive color scheme.

Chapman’s influence on road cars went far beyond paint schemes and race prepping some English Fords. The Lotus Cortina deal didn’t just involve prepping and racing cars. Lotus did considerable modifications and final assembly in-house, establishing a pattern for later boutique shops like Shelby, Roush and Saleen, producing high performance versions sold at factory dealers with factory warrantees.

Though there have been more powerful and faster cars, since the early 1960s Lotus has been the standard by which performance cars’ handling and cornering abilities are measured. Ask anyone who has ever driven a Lotus and they will tell you that nothing, not Porsches, Ferraris, Lamborghinis or anything else, handles like a Lotus. A Lotus simply goes where you put it, giving you precise tactile feedback all the while. They are cars that you drive with your fingers and toes, not brute force. With their light weight, sensitive handling and small displacement engines, there’s an almost feminine character to Lotus road cars, but maybe not too feminine. Like the pretty girl next door who’s got a tat and a piercing that you can’t see with her clothes on.

Chapman was a superb suspension tuner. His earliest racing cars were Austin Seven “specials” used for trials racing, a peculiarly English motorsport akin to hill climbing or mountain biking. Chapman learned early on about the importance of suspension design in traction and maneuverability. When he switched to track racing, Chapman couldn’t afford exotic engines so he knew that he had to make up time in the corners. The skills he learned helped give Lotus production cars superior cornering and handling and a surprisingly supple ride for cars with that amount of grip. Using tires only 4.5″ wide, the Elan was capable of generating over .9g on the skid pad in 1964, a figure that wouldn’t be embarrassed among today’s sports cars.

One could argue that the Europa was the car that brought mid-engine layout from the race track to the street. Sure, there were Ferraris and Lamborghinis with engines in the middle, but Chapman sold almost 10,000 Europas, and while the Europa wasn’t cheap, it also wasn’t exotic expensive so it was accessible to other than the wealthy. It was also pretty quick for its day. At only 1400-1500 lbs even the original S1 and S2 versions with the Renault Gordini engine are fun to drive with 0-60 times under 10 seconds. The Twin Cam Europas were significantly quicker. From the factory, Euro spec Twin Cam equipped Europas had a top speed of 123 mph with 0–60 mph in 7.0 seconds, and a 1/4 mile time of 14.9. Now 14 second cars are nothing to brag about at the drag strip, but remember, that’s from just 96 cubic inches, naturally aspirated.

By comparison, when Road & Track tested the 1967 Shelby GT-500 Mustang, they recorded a 0-60 time of 7.2 seconds. Small wonder that Lotus won the index of performance at LeMans. Chapman’s dedication to efficiency and adding lightness only becomes more influential as time goes on. Though federalized smogified versions with the Stromberg carbs didn’t make all the power that engine could, with the big valve head and Webers, you can build a streetable Twin Cam with 160-180 hp. That’s plenty for a car that weighs less only 3/4 of a ton. Even without those modifications, I’ve been in a very slightly modified federalized Stromberg equipped Europa at an indicated 125, with plenty of RPM left below the red line, and that engine breathes and revs so well that they came standard with a centrifugal rev limiter in the distribolator. Despite their small engine displacements, Loti have always been credible and creditable performance cars.

Toyota copied the Elan’s backbone frame and suspension for their 2000GT, and Mazda did the same with the Elan’s styling for the Miata. The Lotus 7, a car first sold in the 1950s, is still in production by Caterham. Every Lotus road car built has had a composite body and the company is an acknowledged expert with composite materials (and now also the place to go for aluminum chassis tech). The original Elite had a fiberglass monocoque (with some metal stiffeners) in the 1950s! Lotus developed the process for applying paint to molds before laying up the composite, and under Chapman Lotus developed and patented the VARI (vacuum assisted resin injection) process for molding large body panels with uniform distribution of resin. Today every maker of high performance road cars uses splitters, spoilers, winglets, underbody diffusers and other aerodynamic tools developed and popularized by Lotus first on their race cars and then on their road cars.

Lotus built fewer than 40,000 cars during Chapman’s lifetime but his influence transcends those relatively small numbers. Chapman’s obsessions about small, light, efficient cars, advanced composites and lightweight alloys, and lightweight engines with high specific output will only make his influence grow as the world moves towards more fuel efficient vehicles. That the company he founded currently does contract engineering work for just about every car company on the planet (okay, an exaggeration, but their list of clients is long and filled with impressive names) is also a data point for charting Chapman’s influence. Lotus just announced that in cooperation with a Spanish automotive supplier they will be manufacturing a small displacement 3 cylinder engine purpose built for range extended serial hybrid cars, for sale to OEMs.

So Colin Chapman’s role in automotive history is undisputed. What is a bit more disputed is the quality of his character. He’s been accused of taking undue credit for others’ innovations, was described as ruthless and lacking scruples, called a “cheat” by Fleet Street, and questioned for caring more about speed than driver safety. Sterling Moss raced Lotus cars for privateers and respected Chapman but he would not do business with him unless it was in writing. His financial machinations to keep a poorly funded company afloat are legendary. Some of those machinations may have gone over the legal limit. Chapman set up multiple corporate structures for various aspects of Lotus’ business, sometimes obscuring his own involvement.

Former Lotus sales manager and Lotus historian Graham Arnold has been compiling a dossier of Chapman’s patents, but he says that task has been stymied by Chapman’s penchant for filing in a manner designed to reduce his tax liabilities, so many of “Chapman’s” patents don’t carry his name. Fred Bushell, Lotus accountant and Chapman’s right hand man, served 3 years in prison over the Delorean affair. That case involved the diversion of millions in government funding for the Delorean project for which Lotus did most of the engineering and design, not to be confused with Johnny Z D’s cocaine deal. Chapman died just before the scandal broke and Bushell’s trial judge said that if Chapman was alive he’d get ten years. Bushell kept his mouth shut and until his death was close to Hazel and her family, serving as a director of Historic Team Lotus, which maintains, displays and vintage races historic Lotus competition cars, as well as supplies spares and technical support for owners of vintage Lotus racers.

Though Chapman could and did inspire tremendous loyalty from members of his team, he was not beloved by all of his employees. He was not the world’s most sensitive boss. He was driven and demanding and always convinced that he was right, until he changed his own mind. Keith Duckworth fled Lotus to start up Cosworth (though Mike Costin stayed on for a few more years). Duckworth would continue to work with Chapman, but on his own terms as a supplier and Costin’s partner and not as an employee on Chapman’s terms. The development of the Ford Cosworth DFV V8 was pretty much Chapman’s idea but it was soon made available to other constructors, eventually becoming the powerplant of choice for F1 (and other racing series in different form). Chapman didn’t really mind as he was convinced of the technical superiority of the Lotus chassis, just as he had been when he shared Coventry Climax engines with other Formula constructors. Frank Costin, Mike’s brother, was an aerodynamicist for deHavilland and Chapman’s first aero guru (Peter Wright would later fill that role with the ground effects cars), but Frank Costin never was a Lotus employee, preferring to work either for consultant fees or gratis just to see his ideas tested.

Ron Hickman, an important early Lotus employee credited with styling the Elan, also left the company, said to be burned out from dealing with Chapman. He started playing around with some Elan suspension pieces to make a utility clamp for his woodshop, licensed the design to Black & Decker and made something like $47 million in royalties from the Workmate, much more than he ever would have made at Lotus. Chapman was much too frugal for that. When he offered Harry Mundy his choice of either £1,000 or a royalty of one pound per engine for his Twin Cam design, Mundy took the money up front, much to his later chagrin since over 30,000 Twin Cam heads were eventually built. Of course with Lotus’ precarious financials, and Chapman’s business reputation, the up front money was most definitely the safe bet “He could be quite devious – he could think round ahead of you” was Sterling Moss’ assessment of Chapman’s business ethics.

Though he paid the race team bonuses when they won, he could be less than generous with his employees. When Graham Arnold, wrote a speech for a shareholders’ meeting that included thanks to Lotus employees, Chapman refused to deliver the line. When Arnold complained, Chapman replied, “They get paid, don’t they?” After noticing how full the employee parking lot was at the Hethel factory when Chapman arrived there for a Christmas party (at the time he was based at Ketteringham Hall, with Team Lotus) he decided that the payroll was too large. On Christmas Eve that year some workers got a pink slip along with their free holiday turkey. He was a millionaire at age 40 when he took Lotus public, and in time became used to the good life, particularly after the race team landed big sponsorship contracts, though Lotus Cars never really made a lot of money during his lifetime. After his death, many Lotus related assets like Ketteringham Hall, a large manor, stayed in family hands, separate from Lotus Cars.

Still, Chapman was so charismatic, talented and successful, that in the early years people would literally work for him for free, voluntarily like Frank Costin. Others felt that their gratis contributions were not so voluntary. For most concerned, even those who eventually fell out with Chapman, it seems to have been a worthwhile apprenticeship, based on their later successes. He was articulate and persuasive, almost to a fault. One year when the F1 constructors wanted a new 2.0 liter formula, they decided to ask for 3.0 liters, figuring that having just used a 2.5 liter limit, the organizers would counter-offer with 2.0l. They chose Chapman to argue the case and he was successful, too successful. The organizers said 3.0 it was.

It turned out to Chapman’s advantage after he convinced Ford to pony up £100,000 to pay Cosworth to develop the DFV. Duckworth said that Chapman was so persuasive that he could give you 10 reasons why he was right and convince you even though he was wrong. It was also said that he built Lotus road cars with “contempt” for the ultimate customer who had to deal with Chapman’s zeal for low cost and fragile parts. “A man not to be trusted with your wallet or your wife” was how one friend of his characterized the man. In the case of his own wife, Hazel, he got her to put up the original 25 quid to start Lotus Cars in her father’s garage, and later, when some early associates grew tired of being volunteers, her family helped him buy out their interest in the company. Despite allegations of her husband’s impropriety, Hazel has been an indefatigable defender of Colin’s legacy and their son Clive runs Historic Team Lotus. Chapman was a charming rogue who made incredible, but flawed, cars. Charming cars made by an incredible, but flawed, man.

Chapman’s influence can be seen from the large number of books written about Lotus and about him personally. A search at Amazon.com for “Lotus cars” turns up 244 results. Though some are not specific to the man or the marque, being more generally about Formula One, racing, or cars in general, many are dedicated to Lotus cars, and the fact that they appear in so many more general automotive books, says something about Chapman’s role in automotive history. There are at least two extensive personal biographies of Chapman, Colin Chapman, the Man and His Cars: The Authorized Biography by Gerard Crombac, a longtime Chapman associate, and Colin Chapman Wayward Genius by Mike Lawrence. Crombac had the cooperation of Hazel Chapman and other family members. As would be expected from an “authorized” biography, it avoids the less savory aspects of Chapman’s life and career. Lawrence’s book doesn’t avoid the warts, including the amphetamines and barbiturates that Chapman used to maintain an insanely hectic schedule. In the mid 1960s, Chapman was simultaneously running the Formula One team, the Lotus-Ford Indianapolis 500 program, and the car company, all while the company was moving its factory from Cheshunt to the aerodrome at Hethel, and while he was swinging the deal for the Lotus Cortina. Though Ford was pleased with the results at Indy and with the Lotus Cortina project, they decided to not give Lotus the GT40 project because of fears that the small company and Chapman were already overextended.

Now comes the dean of automotive writers, Karl Ludvigsen, to give us an accurate measure of the man’s impact on the automotive world, Colin Chapman Inside the Innovator, from Haynes Publishing. Ludvigsen could have written a standard biography, having first met Chapman in 1958 at the Italian Grand Prix. However, not wanting to tread on ground already covered by Crombac, Lawrence, and others, Ludvigsen’s 49th book, is more of a technical biography than a chronological one. In his introduction (the book has a foreword by Emerson Fittipaldi) the author says that the thematic approach “allowed me to follow Colin Chapman through specific disciplines to see how he coped with them through the years, how his thinking evolved – or didn’t – with time and experience. I found this adventure enlightening and hope you will too.”

One aim of Ludvigsen was to look at Chapman’s innovations and fairly assess whether or not credit was due. As a ruthless self-promoter, Chapman was not adverse to offering a revisionist autobiography, so one can’t exactly trust his accounts, and some of his critics or those who felt used by him may have shaded their own accounts in the other direction for their own reasons. Ludvigsen gets to the heart of the matter. He’s unsparing when Chapman took credit for others’ work and he’s full of praise when Chapman was truly an innovator. He also makes the point that though Chapman may not have actually turned the first shovel of dirt for some of his groundbreaking innovations, it was Chapman who championed them and brought them to wide acceptance.

An amateur shrink might say that Chapman was a narcissist who used people to achieve his ends. He was close to some of his drivers and could be dismissive of others – though if they had a Lotus ride it clearly meant that they were talented. His talent as a manager and ability to field competitive rides can be seen from the number of successful two-driver teams like Andretti/Petersen that he fielded. Even though he always told one driver that he was #1 I don’t believe that Chapman ever gave his drivers “team orders” to determine outcomes in favor of the #1. Running teams with two top drivers could be detrimental to winning drivers championships as his own drivers split points. Lotus won 7 constructors’ titles but only 6 drivers championships, losing that title in a season when Petersen and Andretti won more races between them than the eventual winner. After Jim Clark’s death in an F2 race at Hockenheim, he swore to never get so close to his drivers, yet both Fittipaldi and Andretti considered him a close friend. Nigel Mansell saw him as a second father and stayed with the team out of loyalty after Chapman’s death. Andretti clearly admired Chapman, “A very special man. One of a kind”, he told this writer, but his admiration had its limits.

As Ludvigsen relates, “When we first got together, Colin said, ‘Mario, I always want to make a car as light as possible.’ I said, ‘Well, Colin, I want to live as long as possible. I guess we need to talk.”

Though he could be an original thinker, one of his greatest talents was assessing others’ talent. He had two modes of innovation. One was a structured approach from first principles to final design. Chapman was fond of lists, dossiers, specs and design briefs. In the other mode he’d “water ski” over an idea, giving his subordinates the basic idea and then checking and correcting their work. When one looks at who he worked with, it’s easy to see why that approach also had its successes. Many of the people Chapman employed, did business with, or used as suppliers are a who’s who of the production and racing automotive worlds. Others never recreated their success at Lotus after they left the company – Chapman could be a strong motivator. Like some others of great accomplishment, Bob Dylan comes to mind, Chapman is frequently described as a “magpie”, seeing potential in ideas whose own originators did not realize. When his in-house “queerbox” transaxle designs proved unreliable, he convinced ZF to build him one, asking them to modify one of their designs. The ZF transaxle became one of two widely used for racing in the 1960s and 1970s – the other being the Hewland. Perhaps not just coincidentally Mike Hewland was one of the few people not taken in by Chapman’s charms, and Lotus rarely used a Hewland gearbox. When Renault introduced the 16,with its inline FWD layout, he immediately recognized the drivetrain’s potential for a midengine sports car – which became the Europa.

Designers and engineers who worked for him said that he could look at a drawing and then suggest a number of improvements – some they’d already considered and others very novel. Chapman’s respect within the racing world (along with his ability to seemingly talk people into just about anything) was such that individuals and companies routinely supplied Lotus with prototype, modified or custom parts. This had its origins in Lotus’ early days when Chapman would get vendors to send him raw castings he couldn’t afford to produce for Lotus to then custom machine. Almost all Lotus production cars used parts scavenged from other automakers, from switchgear and lamps to complete engines and transmissions, a tradition the modern Lotus company keeps alive by using Toyota engines in the Elise, Exige and Evora. Much of the front suspension and steering for the Elan and +2 uses components sourced from Triumph, virtually identical to parts used on the Spitfire. With Lotus, the sum was always greater than the parts. After being sprinkled with some Chapman suspension magic (the Lotus formula was soft springs and stiff shock absorbers), though, the Elan could literally run rings around the Spit.

A musician once told me, “Hacks copy, artists steal.” Colin Chapman was no hack. While he may have taken credit for ideas not his own, the automotive world is the better for his popularizing those ideas. It’s up to the historians like Ludvigsen to give credit where it’s due.

Ludvigsen’s fairness extends to an unvarnished look at Chapman’s failures, his undeveloped or aborted ideas, abandoned ideas that may yet show promise like active suspension, as well as his fruitful ideas that could have been even more successful. Since Chapman’s obsession with weight extended to halving the number of rivets holding a chassis together, and calculating out precisely how much fuel to carry, Lotus racing cars didn’t always finish races and were justifiably characterized as fragile and sometimes lacking reliability – a characterization also applied to Lotus production cars. Winning, though, wasn’t Chapman’s goal, speed was. He would rather lead a race, proving a new idea, than win with something conventional. Mario Andretti said that as revolutionary and fast as the championship winning 72 and 79 cars were, they would have been even faster had they been stiffer and sturdier. The sound of welds breaking, rivets popping and chassises groaning was not exactly music to Lotus racers ears but a common refrain, nonetheless. One reason why F1 banned high wings after Chaparral and then Lotus proved their effectiveness was the many structural failures Lotus experienced with their wing struts. Jim Hall has often said that he and other CanAm constructors using high wings were unfairly tarred due to flimsy construction used in F1.

At 400 large format pages, the book is encyclopaediac, lavishly illustrated with historical photos from Ludvigsen’s own library as well as the historic Team Lotus archives at Ketteringham Hall. Included are facsimiles of Chapman’s own work lists, design briefs and component sketches, as well as a timeline of his life, plus an extensive bibliography and a fairly comprehensive index.

Ludvigsen even goes into the origins of an aphorism attributed to Chapman, “simplicate and add lightness”, finding that the phrase was originally coined by engineering and aviation pioneer William Stout. Chapman, who started flying while in engineering school and later served with the RAF, and briefly worked for British Aluminium, had a lifelong interest in aviation and may have picked up the phrase through that interest. While Chapman is famous for his dedication to lightness, he also simplicated, often using a single component to serve two functions (engine as structural component, airfoil radiator pods).

It’s not a surprise that a person with Chapman’s ego had issues with authority, though in his own domain he was fairly despotic. He ran his racing teams and companies like a dictator, shareholders and directors be damned (though directors were more often than not associates of his). After moveable aero devices were banned in F1, he had the rear wing of the Lotus 72 shock mounted with rubber, effectively allowing the wing to passively trim at high speed for lower drag, at least until the scrutineers discovered why Chapman was using the flexible mount. When French scrutineers would not let the Lotus 23 compete in the 1963 LeMans race (supposedly protecting French entrants with other small displacement racers), Chapman, who by then had won a number of class titles at LeMans, vowed to never race there again, and he didn’t, despite how publicity from his wins there helped sales of the road cars. Towards the end of his career, the radical twin-chassis 88 was designed to the letter of F1 regulations specifically to get around restrictions on aero devices. When F1 disqualified the car, Chapman noticeably lost interest in racing.

The book, as mentioned, is divided into chapters that individually address different technical areas, though the first and the last are a bit more general as they try to give a broader perspective on Chapman’s career. The alliterative chapter titles give a good idea of the topics covered: Conceiving Concepts, Engine Enterprise, Transmission Topics, Suspension Sagas, Structure Stories, Whittling Weight, Aerodynamic Adventures, Discovering Downforce, Man Managing, Driver Dealings, Racing Realities, Coda to Chapman.

I’m a confirmed Lotus fan, having owned an Elan since the mid 1970s, this is hardly the first Lotus book that I’ve read, and on almost every page, nearly every paragraph, I learned something new about the company and the man.

The book isn’t perfect. I spotted a couple of editing mistakes, and one is often idiomatically reminded that the writer is based in England. I’ve owned British cars, I know the difference between a hood and a bonnet, and I find the Britishisms to be charming but some might find them offputting. Of course, those that do wouldn’t likely be reading a book about a quintessentially British car guy. The format Ludvigsen decided to use sometimes gets chronologically confusing, with the author both jumping forward and back within the chapters and covering different aspects of the same chronological events in different chapters. Also, while Lotus road cars are not ignored, it seems to me that Ludvigsen’s main emphasis is Chapman’s racing innovations. Of course that partly reflects Chapman’s own interests, as he was much more intimately involved in the design and development of the race cars, tending to delegate more matters to others for the road cars.

If there’s a single Lotus production model that most accurately reflects Chapman, Ludvigsen says that it’s the Esprit. One of the few Lotus models equipped with an engine designed and built by Lotus, it “exemplified its creator’s dedication to lightness, functionality and agility”.

Ludvigsen’s assessment is that regardless of how many of “his” ideas were truly the product of Colin Chapman, and regardless of his lack of scruples in getting his ideas made concrete, Chapman was a true innovator. He was eager to embrace new ideas and eager to discard old ones (sometimes too quickly), even some of his own. In addition to his own creativity, he had a great eye for talent and technology.

He may not have been a saint, but the automotive world is the better for there having been a Colin Chapman. Colin Chapman Inside The Innovator is a masterful accounting of Chapman’s influence on that world. In his introduction Ludvigsen expressed the hope that readers would find the book enlightening and in that task I’d say that he succeeded. As with his biographies of Ferdinand Porsche and Enzo Ferrari, this will become a standard reference on Chapman and his career.

Disclaimer: Haynes Publishing sent me a review copy of the book. The book is comprehensive but not all the Lotus factoids in this review are in the book. Yeah, the review is long, but so’s the book. Besides, you’re not paying anything to read it.